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posted by chromas on Friday September 28 2018, @07:40PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @12:46AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @12:46AM (#741627)

    A signature that could probably be obtained by $TLA government org with an NSL to silence the vendor. So yes, only ‘bad guys’ with power.

    Starting Score:    0  points
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:49AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:49AM (#741657)

    Careful, you're not as anonymous as you might think.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:37PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:37PM (#741799)

      Sure I am.