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from the false-flag-to-justify-forced-secureboot dept.
The company ESET, based in Slovakia, has announced finding the first-ever UEFI rootkit in the wild. Once infected with the malware the only option is to reflash the SPI firmware or else replace the whole motherboard.
First spotted in early 2017, LoJax is a trojaned version of a popular legitimate LoJack laptop anti-theft software from Absolute Software, which installs its agent into the system's BIOS to survive OS re-installation or drive replacement and notifies device owner of its location in case the laptop gets stolen.
According to researchers, the hackers slightly modified the LoJack software to gain its ability to overwrite UEFI module and changed the background process that communicates with Absolute Software's server to report to Fancy Bear's C&C servers.
UEFI is an overly complex replacement for BIOS, and is often conflated with one of its payloads, Restricted Boot aka Secure Boot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday September 29 2018, @01:19AM
As several other people have commented, UEFI *is* an OS and one that sits below your actual OS, i.e., has super-root access, correct? I can see this thing being engineered to pretend like it's been overwritten but actually not be if someone tries a manual flash by the usual method (boot into legacy mode with a USB stick with the firmware image on it for example). This implies needing to go to the physical level, meaning you'd have to attach pins to the chip and manually reflash it. That's beyond even my comfort zone at the moment. This is scary stuff.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...