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Lenovo Still Wants to Own Your Box

posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 12 2015, @11:59PM   Printer-friendly
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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by dyingtolive on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:20AM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:20AM (#222022)

    Wonder how well it updated autochk on my G500 dual booting OSX and Linux.

    Still, I shouldn't laugh too loudly. They might have something for that too.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 13 2015, @01:30AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 13 2015, @01:30AM (#222053) Journal

    Yeah, that was my thought. I get the stupid computer, nuke it, install my favorite *nix, and all is well until I shut it down. When I pick it up to use it again, there's windows! That would really suck.

    • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:27AM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:27AM (#222081)

      I was thinking more a OS appropriate payload to compromise your system regardless of the OS you chose.

      ...in retrospect, I think I'm just repeating what you said. :P

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