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Comment by Kristine1975 | Hacker News Reader

Kristine1975

The good old days... when viruses merely displayed a funny message or erased your hard disk, but didn't turn your computer into part of a botnet controlled by organized crime.

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There was an insidious period when viruses would attempt to flash the bios with garbage, rendering the computer useless. I heard that some crafty individuals would recover by purchasing a motherboard of the same model, swapping the bios chip to boot up, hot swapping the old chip back and then reflashing the old chip with a good bios. After that, you could also reinstall the new bios chip in the motherboard and return it, slightly used.

I'll take a botnet computer over a bricked one any day.

I'll take a trashed BIOS over a backdoored BIOS any day. Firmware viruses are a very real threat today.

If anyone feels like researching this, don't look at the BadBios conspiracy, that's an internet meme.

Instead look at things like Intel's trusted computing. Igor Skochinsky (of fame from Hexrays / IDA, and moderator on /r/reverseengineering) has an excellent powerpoint highlighting some research on their Management Engine, which is probably in your computer right now.

pdf: https://github.com/skochinsky/papers/raw/master/2014-10%20%5...

A bricked computer isn't as likely to empty your bank account though.

I'm imagining the iFixit instructions for this on an iMac.

I think many of the UEFI variable bugs that brick systems can be easily exploited from Windows even today.

Or worse!

http://i.stack.imgur.com/qsMM2.jpg

LMAO! Good old days, need that paper to frame it!

Or weren't written by a government as part of a multi-million-dollar malware R&D program that reduces to practice way-out-there speculations about what malicious software could theoretically do.

I'd rather suck in a botnet virus DDOS-ing some random site over losing my data.

This is a fantastic, numerous talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2g9lgYrYJM

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