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First-ever UEFI Rootkit Spotted in the Wild

posted by chromas on Friday September 28 2018, @07:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the false-flag-to-justify-forced-secureboot dept.

canopic jug writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday September 28 2018, @07:54PM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Friday September 28 2018, @07:54PM (#741512) Homepage Journal

    UEFI is an overly complex replacement for BIOS,

    Ridiculously complex, for something that should just in it the hardware and hand over control.

    --
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Friday September 28 2018, @09:07PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Friday September 28 2018, @09:07PM (#741547)

    Spot on. Code-bloat hits at all levels. I remember when the OS made BIOS calls, the way system structure was supposed to happen. As CPU / RAM / bus speeds increased, slow BIOS ROMs were "shadowed" and cached, but were still slow, and better OS-level drivers became the norm.