A Malware in Your BIOS Keeps the US Department of Defense Awake

Rakshasa is malware buried deep inside the firmware of an Intel motherboard granting backdoor access to any outside party who knows what to look for. Rakshasa can replace the original boot firmware at time of manufacturing and is extremely difficult to detect. Security expert Jonathan Brossard demonstrated his code at the Black Hat convention in Las Vegas in July. His aim is to raise awareness about the dangers of non open source firmware. You could be buying a computer -or any hardware for that matter- with a backdoor already installed.

And that is exactly what is keeping some people at the US Department of Defense up at night.

The military is increasingly dependent on information technology and it uses commercial components to build its devices. But most hardware is manufactured outside US borders. The DoD fears that backdoors or malicious software might be pre-installed on chips allowing an adversary to listen in on communications or disable the chip all together. If the chips at the core of the US defense system would turn against it, the system would be seriously crippled. We’re talking sci-fi movie scenario kind of crippled.



Read full article at TechTheFuture.