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posted by janrinok on Sunday January 23 2022, @12:06AM   Printer-friendly

Chinese APT deploys MoonBounce implant in UEFI firmware:

Security researchers have unveiled MoonBounce, a custom UEFI firmware implant used in targeted attacks.

The implant is believed to be the work of APT41, a Chinese-speaking sophisticated hacking group also known as Winnti or Double Dragon.

On January 20, Kaspersky researchers said that at the end of last year, the team uncovered a case of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) compromise caused by the modification of one component in the firmware – a core element called SPI flash, located on the motherboard.

"Due to its emplacement on SPI flash which is located on the motherboard instead of the hard disk, the implant is capable of persisting in the system across disk formatting or replacement," the team noted.

Not only did the tweak to the firmware result in persistence at a level that is extremely difficult to remove, the team says that the firmware image was "modified by attackers in a way that allowed them to intercept the original execution flow of the machine's boot sequence and introduce a sophisticated infection chain."

The developer of the MoonBounce UEFI rootkit is said to have a deep and thorough understanding of how UEFI systems work.

"The source of the infection starts with a set of hooks that intercept the execution of several functions in the EFI Boot Services Table, namely AllocatePool, CreateEventEx and ExitBootServices," the researchers explained. "Those hooks are used to divert the flow of these functions to malicious shellcode that is appended by the attackers to the CORE_DXE image, which in turn sets up additional hooks in subsequent components of the boot chain, namely the Windows loader."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 23 2022, @09:05AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 23 2022, @09:05AM (#1214966)

    > No, you actually don't.

    I have my Amateur Licence, and participate directly with more people over the unencrypted-unhypermonetized radio than I do on the net. I can cope.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 23 2022, @05:08PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday January 23 2022, @05:08PM (#1215029) Journal

    Can you also cope with the attackers emptying your bank account? I guess you don't store your money in cash and/or gold at home, do you?

    And in case you think you're secure because you don't use online banking: What do you think how the communication between the ATM and the bank, or the credit card company and the bank, is secured?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Sunday January 23 2022, @06:06PM

      by shrewdsheep (5215) on Sunday January 23 2022, @06:06PM (#1215051)

      In principle, banks and other official institutions do not have to establish trust without shared keys. They can use one-time passwords instead for communication among each other. As such money flow keeps traceable and reversible even if online banking is compromised.