5 ms·
There was an insidious period when viruses would attempt to flash the bios with garbage, rendering the computer useless. I heard that some crafty individuals w
by eric-hu 11y ago
There was an insidious period when viruses would attempt to flash the bios with garbage, rendering the computer useless. I heard that some crafty individuals would recover by purchasing a motherboard of the same model, swapping the bios chip to boot up, hot swapping the old chip back and then reflashing the old chip with a good bios. After that, you could also reinstall the new bios chip in the motherboard and return it, slightly used.
I'll take a botnet computer over a bricked one any day.
- kosma 11y agoI'll take a trashed BIOS over a backdoored BIOS any day. Firmware viruses are a very real threat today.
- nickysielicki 11y agoIf anyone feels like researching this, don't look at the BadBios conspiracy, that's an internet meme. Instead look at things like Intel's trusted computing. Igor Skochinsky (of fame from Hexrays / IDA, and moderator on /r/reverseengineering) has an excellent powerpoint highlighting some research on their Management Engine, which is probably in your computer right now. pdf: https://github.com/skochinsky/papers/raw/master/2014-10%20%5BBreakpoint%5D%20Intel%20ME%20-%20Two%20Years%20Later.pdf https://github.com/skochinsky/papers/raw/master/2014-10%20%5...
- hartpuff 11y agoA bricked computer isn't as likely to empty your bank account though.
- lostlogin 11y agoI'm imagining the iFixit instructions for this on an iMac.
- yuhong 11y agoI think many of the UEFI variable bugs that brick systems can be easily exploited from Windows even today.