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Yesterday, at the BlackHat Asia 2017 security conference, researchers from cyber-security firm Cylance disclosed two vulnerabilities in the firmware of Gigabyte BRIX small computing devices, which allow an attacker to write malicious content to the UEFI firmware.
During their presentation, researchers installed a proof-of-concept UEFI ransomware, preventing the BRIX devices from booting, but researchers say the same flaws can be used to plant rootkits that allow attackers to persist malware for years.
Cylance researchers said they've identified these flaws at the start of the year, and have worked with Gigabyte, American Megatrends Inc. (AMI), and CERT/CC to fix the flaws in time.
Affected Gigabyte devices include GB-BSi7H-6500 (firmware version vF6), and GB-BXi7-5775 (firmware version vF2).
Gigabyte is expected to release firmware vF7 for GB-BSi7H-6500 devices in the upcoming days. The GB-BXi7-5775 line is not being produced anymore and has reached EOL (End Of Life), so Gigabyte won't be releasing a new firmware for this series.
Source: BleepingComputer
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @07:22AM
That rm did not delete the firmware. It deleted some settings that were supposed to be user writable, the problem was that certain manufacturers forgot to include default values for those settings, and because of that, after removing the settings, UEFI was unable to get to a point where you could set those to a sane value.
Now that I think about it, does UEFI still store settings in battery-backed NVRAM? If so, removing the battery for a couple of minutes might lead to the same result.