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Comment by Fr0styMatt | Hacker News Reader

He does address the high-frequency sound thing though. Basically, your laptop speaker will be lucky to transmit at near 20KHz and your laptop microphone would be even less likely to be able to pick up any ultrasonics that are supposedly being transmitted.

As for the specificity of the BIOS environment - he's saying you'd need to compile the BIOS code against the manufacturer's libraries AND make versions specific to board revisions. ESPECIALLY if you're doing stuff like initializing and using the soundcard (which he also addresses).

So for it to be true, this malware would be created by someone with access to several codebases and hardware docs, etc, of different motherboard manufacturers. Not to mention the test lab they must have to make sure this all works.

Not to mention the fact that in THREE YEARS none of this has been made open. OR a USB analyzer hasn't been tried, etc.

Way too many red flags here.

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> He does address the high-frequency sound thing though. Basically, your laptop speaker will be lucky to transmit at near 20KHz

He asserted it but there are working demos showing this being possible. Which of the two is more convincing?

> As for the specificity of the BIOS environment - he's saying you'd need to compile the BIOS code against the manufacturer's libraries AND make versions specific to board revisions. ESPECIALLY if you're doing stuff like initializing and using the soundcard (which he also addresses).

The BIOS doesn't need to contain everything, only the portion needed to load an exploit which compromises the OS and uses the normal code to talk the soundcard, network, etc. Just as no operating system in existence needs to have per-board boot loaders, this doesn't need to do more than load the next stage.

> Way too many red flags here.

Again, I'm not saying the BadBIOS claims don't require proof - only that a post which is confused about those claims and makes arguments which are contradicted by running code isn't a good critique.

Yes, it looks more like a diary of somebody going insane (note: three years he sees it sometimes, now more often, he's "fighting" alone, he cuts the speaker and the mic in the notebook to block the malware, doesn't publish network captures, others see nothing in his BIOS captures (!)) than the pragmatic investigation of the real malware.

I kind of agree. Nothing in the badBIOS descriptions I've read is technically impossible — especially if you assume a vulnerability and updatable firmware in a widespread UHCI/EHCI implementation — but the story does sound a bit like other delusional people I've encountered on the net. The awful thing about being smart, competent, and crazy is that your own intelligence is working to construct the most bulletproof support it can for your delusion.

Hopefully someone will get some more definite evidence soon (eg, an external logic analyzer on the USB wires during a machine infection).

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