badbios and other comments from blog The Technology blog and podcast

badbios and other comments

Hi jared and all.
Well the bad bios is interesting.
However to get a bios infected there are only a couple ways practically that can happen.
1. bad device, the device was infected before you got it.
This has happened as one manufacturer of an mp3 player got a virus that infected their systems normally.
This virus did then infect the firmware files for the mp3 player which were then uploaded to the bios of the mp3 player and the mp3 player got infected, the virus then could infect other systems once the mp3 player was plugged in.
That at least does give us some protection in this example.
To infect the system from the net without all the device crap one would have to get a file virus infecting a firmware file on the system.
that may happen but a file os virus is easier to handle than a normal one.
guess it could infect drivers and stuff to.
2. bad usb key.
You hope that any new usb key is not infected that you buy.
However if you use other’s usb keys they could be infected.
most do have antivirus software, and your friends shouldn’t have an infected usb key anyway.
Picking up an infected usb.
For starters you shouldn’t pick up other’s usb keys.
However a security test based on badbios and other stuff was picked up by security company locally that had dropped usb keys all over the place.
They were able to infect and gain control of several hundred systems because people got the drives and plugged them in.
Buying dodgy devices is another thing which is a bit hard to avoid.
most devices are made in china and most quite cheap.
stock cards in laptops and desktops are standardised to one manufacturer or so, and are almost never updated unless needed.
So, yeah I guess that could happen.
It does sound like though you do actually have to know a load and do a load to infect the protected flash space of the bios.
I guess you could use a third party updater to do it, but users should get their manufacturers bios and not third party anyway, though with thirdparty generics coming out that is I guess possible.
However, how quick would people notice it I wander.
this article is out, there may be others.
And at any rate to replace your bios is simple as replacing your main board and maybe your hard drive or replacing the computer and getting rid of the bung usb key.
I have had usb keys fail on me on various systems due to poor design and bad connections though.
I have never picked up or purchaced an infected device.
I have not downloaded lately in the last 10 years anything that could be infected.
occasionally I may pick up an infection via a website but clearing out temp caches which I do after every session does the trick.
In short I don’t think users need to worry about this, it seems that it would have to be an internal job for short range coms and would be quite hard to actually do.
Now if someone was able to penitrate on a physical level, the factory of some of these things without detection, infect or leave infected stuff round then maybe that would be noticed.
The scandle would be quite huge and the infections would be found out in the end.
Pluss the persons that did that would really be asking for it.
and well.
To be honest I think we need to watch out for the load of hoaks criptolocker emails claming to be previding protection from badbios by incripting your bios.
Every time any security article is released like this, it promotes spam and loads of it.
On another note, ms has decidedd to go through the first motions of depricating the skype desktop client.
That means in the first instance that next month no third party apps will work.
bar recording apps and wireless devices.
but soon that will go to.
After which I fully expect skype to die.
with only the ms cloud and inaccessable skype clients, pluss win 8 and 8.1 which are cloud base, I fully expect the isolation of the blind from mainstream windows tech at some point in the next 5 years.
If I had known I would have got another blind spaciffic device rather than my new laptop.
they cost far to much but we don’t rely on ms.
and that doesn’t help people I talk with that use skype desktop on their win7 boxes.
some still like desktop clients on win8.

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badbios and other comments was released on November 12, 2013 at 10:31 am by crashmaster in general-updates-and-announcements.
Last modified: November 12, 2013.

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