In "the good old days" before the race to the bottom that value-engineered every penny of cost out of a product, motherboards and expansion cards had onboard h

In "the good old days" before the race to the bottom that value-engineered every penny of cost out of a product, motherboards and expansion cards had onboard hardware jumpers or switches that protected the ROM from modification. It was impossible to update the BIOS without opening the case and physically moving the jumper. But that jumper cost money, and perhaps more importantly confused half the sysadmins and users out there. So the jumper is gone. Any program that knows the magic output sequence can overwrite the firmware. We're relying on security through obscurity to save us. And if I'm Dell, I'm thinking: Hey, what about HP? What about IBM? Why single me out? Most if not all of these computers are vulnerable to similar attacks.