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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @11:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @11:52AM (#741762)

    A motherboard I had years ago had two jumpers. One to prevent flashing, and the other to force loading the flash from backup.
    Why isn't this a standard? Because another chip on the board with a backup copy of the original flash is too expensive?