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TBH, I don't think this would be very effective at all. I manage hundreds of servers for businesses, and if I ever see a Dell splash screen it's purely by accid
by halfcat 12y ago
TBH, I don't think this would be very effective at all. I manage hundreds of servers for businesses, and if I ever see a Dell splash screen it's purely by accident. With basically everyone using virtualization, it's a long time between reboots for physical servers to begin with. And when I do need to reboot the physical server, I'm usually sitting at home in my underwear, not looking at the console. We can manage most of the BIOS-level settings through Dell-provided tools, so even when we change BIOS settings, we don't go into the BIOS.
In my IT experience, anything requiring manual human checking basically doesn't get done after the first handful of iterations. If it needs to be reliable, it needs to be automated. My best guess is, you can install a package from Dell to enable BIOS info to be pulled via WMI (Dell OMCI I think). You can set all of your BIOS asset tags to some unique value (per machine) and if it changes, your monitoring software will see it and alert you. I'm not sure how easy this would be to spoof though. It might be trivial.
Fortunately, most of the models they mention have been out of warranty for some years now, and most businesses choose to upgrade to a supported model. For businesses who chose not to upgrade to supported models, it's usually a reflection of the immature management in charge of the business, meaning they make poor decisions in many areas, so a BIOS hack is way down the list of potential problems for them.
- pdkl95 12y ago> In my IT experience, anything requiring manual human checking basically doesn't get done I fully agree - that why I like this idea; it doesn't rely on humans actively doing something, and instead engages the subconscious. Because our brain is constantly making predictions about everything we perceive, we tend to notice (without trying) if something subtly violates those predictions. We see this effect when people describe how they felt something was "off" or "wrong" before some big event. They probably did see something important, but not enough to recognize it or parse it consciously. Engaging the warning system that our fight-or-flight reflexes - which is very effective at processing visual sense input - is probably one of the more practical ways of getting past in this "humans won't bother" category. Also, a visual-hash isn't really trying to be perfect anyway. It's just a trick that would be very easy to implement. It won't get anywhere close to catching all attacks. It would probably catch more than our current strategy of doing nothing. When you start from 0, any improvement helps. The only reason not to do this kind of scheme would be if it raised the costs, but I doubt that would be a problem given how much headroom we have in modern hardware.