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Hacking Hard Drive Firmware

posted by janrinok on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the old-school-hacking dept.

novak writes:

I ran across this article from last year again and it got me thinking. The article is a story about how a hardware hacker was able to hack hard drive firmware, first to upload his own firmware, but also to take advantage of the embedded controller, and even install linux on the controller. If you haven't read it it's fairly impressive. [Ed's Comment: I would go further and say that it is a amazing piece of hacking, in the traditional meaning of the word.]

It seems that lately there have been a lot of vulnerabilities targeting embedded peripherals. Those in the article come to mind, also badUSB, and some IPMI vulnerabilities.

What do you think? Are the number of attack vectors targeting embedded peripherals a consequence of more powerful controllers? Worse software? More sophisticated attackers? Or just a random occurrence?

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:45PM (#121125)

    Put the operating system (Linux) in the firmware and everything else on the platters. It might be a pain in the ass to update but might make a faster boot and less likely for malware/corruption.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:50PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:50PM (#121126) Journal

    And where do you get the track decoding drivers and realtime response time ensurance? or even just hardware interface documentation?

    • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:29PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:29PM (#121177)

      By putting on goofy clothes and screaming "hack the planet", I'll wager.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @04:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @04:05PM (#121131)

    HP made a Jornada 820 laptop without a hard drive in a similar way. http://www.winceonline.com/jornada2.html [winceonline.com] The operating system (Windows CE) and pre-installed programs was in rom, everything else was on prom or something like that. Booted in a few seconds. I have one that still works, not much software is available for it though.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @04:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @04:09PM (#121132)

      Forgot to mention, I put a wireless card in it to connect to my broadband.