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Lenovo Still Wants to Own Your Box

posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 12 2015, @11:59PM   
from the flash-me-a-bios dept.

Anonymous Coward writes:

It turns out that Lenovo has code in their BIOS which creates and maintains a backdoor executable in Windows 7 and Windows 8.x installs. Simply wiping the machine when you bring it home to remove the factory crap-ware is not enough to overcome this implementation. This issue is supposed to have been resolved via a recently released patch that doesn't remove but rather disables this 'feature' which is being called the Lenovo Service Engine.

Original Source for the news:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=29497693&sid=ddf3e32512932172454de515091db014#p29497693

Link to patch:
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_notebook

This exploit takes advantage of a Windows feature called Windows Platform Binary Table. This is essentially a method created for the purpose of enabling UEFI bioses to load extra binaries at boot time.

link to paper on WPBT:
http://feishare.com/attachments/article/298/windows-platform-binary-table.pdf

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Original Submission

• Re:editors, its NOT all lenovos! (Score: 4, Insightful) by cockroach on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:14AM

  by cockroach (2266) on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:14AM (#222018)

  Thanks to the closedness of things we don't know that it's not all Lenovos, all we know is that some models are affected. I for one am rather glad that my Thinkpad runs coreboot these days.

  Parent

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