In the Security Now podcast taped on August 4th, 2020: you will learn about yet another booting issue or yet, a booting problem similar to how Meltdown and Specter were headlines in 2018-2019.
In June, the antivirus company ESET stumbled across an insidious strain of ransomware that prevents a computer from loading and locks its data.
A saving grace was that, in order for the attack to work, a ubiquitous feature known as UEFI Secure Boot, which protects computers from getting malicious
code slipped on their systems, would have to be disabled.
This bootable problem effects the booting process of every Linux-based computer to date.
The article I’m going to be linking to comes from Cyberscoop. New bug in PC booting process could take years to fix, researchers say is the article. While this doesn’t effect Windows as far as we can tell like the others, we should be aware of what is going on with different operating systems. Feel free to take a read of this one if this interests you.
If I’m wrong and even though I read its linux-based, if it does effect windows, please leave a comment to clarify. I know it talked about UEFI, and the secure boot, but all or most machines have this in their bios. This type of work i don’t do, so my knowledge may not be correct. I’d love clarification, so comment away!
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Hmmm, this is a problem.
Secure boot is fine for modern pcs, and linux distributions but there are a lot of reasons to turn this off.
1. if you are a guru using legacy software, and need more to use than windows 10 or windows 8, you will probably want to turn this off.
windows 7and lower will not run secure boot or will even boot properly.
Worse, if this is a booting issue with secure boot, I could imagine this effecting bios systems which are simpler to handle.
And in some ways I wish for the old non secure bios system back.
I had to recently configure a new workstation/server for my uncle, who got it x lease.
The system was configured to start at a certain time, turn off at a certain time, and do all sorts of tasks at certain times.
To get access to that I had to get into a ufi interface which was its own mini linux shell with a file edit and such menu bar and was not at all accessible to anyone.
I luckily had a sighted friend by chance at my house and we spent 30 minutes disabling a lot of things.
As for linux, no doubt linux coders will probably fix this quite quickly at least for the os.
A lot of distributions can use ufi now thank goodness, however a few can not.
Worse, I feel for those systems not updated anymore due to age.
For a lot of the latest systems everything released in the last 1-5 years it may not be as big of an issue as there will be bios and firmware chip updates to address this in short order.
At any rate, the entire net runs on linux, all servers run on linux, and well if not all then most of them do.
This site runs on linux.
So an attacker could take down the entire net.
I have no idea how to do this and I doubt microsoft is that corrupted.
But just think if they were, take down all linux servers so everyone would have to buy its windows server then put the prices up.
Its obvious, but I will be watching this space, I wouldn’t put it past any big company to take advantage of this.
Lets hope its just another intel issue again.
For myself I switched to amd because of the fact the intel breaches and the slow downs in microsoft products didn’t interest me.
Intel have released 2 new generations that have fixed this and have updated firmware for 6 7th and 8th cpus and this should be done but still.
My issue is not the manufacturers themselves but how microsoft fixes this.
I have seen posts on several blogs with hacks around the meltdown and spector security patches because of the fact they slow down systems far to much and everyone wants their performance back.
Else they have to replace everything intel with something that will work properly and it was the chief reason 2 years ago that I switched to an amd system.
I may eventually switch back to an intel 9th or 10th gen system at some point but I have no issues with all this stuff.