This brings us full circle to the original question, though: Did the security researcher write a program to dump the contents of EEPROM rather than desoldering

This brings us full circle to the original question, though: Did the security researcher write a program to dump the contents of EEPROM rather than desoldering the chips? if so, then he may have been hoodwinked by the virus. Is this different than getting a dump of the BIOS before flashing it? Are we talking about different chips on the motherboard?