Yes it is a stretch. a. BIOS are all insanely different. A motherboard manufacturer can switch ethernet controllers within a run of a single board and ship an

Yes it is a stretch. a. BIOS are all insanely different. A motherboard manufacturer can switch ethernet controllers within a run of a single board and ship an entirely new BIOS. You would need to generate thousands of viral stubs to get the infection spread being claimed, and the malware would need to move around GB of these BIOS so it has them handy when it runs into a new motherboard. b. Researchers have worked on this and demonstrated it was possible. They had to modify off the shelf hardware to make it work. PC speakers are not designed to emit frequencies outside the audible range. It's like saying "we have the technology for cell phones, and my home router has a radio built in, it must be able to talk to cell towers!" The situation where I see his claims being plausible is if a state actor has broken in and modified his hardware, and combined it with a viral threat custom built for what they know he has in his home.