If you were lucky enough to attend this year's CanSecWest conference than you probably sat through Anibal Sacco and Alfredo Ortega's talk on the BIOS infection, and how this would persist even through a hard-drive wipe / operating system reinstall. These guys are extremely bright and are pushing hard at the edge of security research. The slideshow published by Core Security, provides the overview, which I'll summarize here with what I can remember of the technology and tools used to enable the hack shown at the conference. First is getting a copy of a BIOS to hack. There are two options, and one which made the researcher's lives easier, VMware supplies both a generic "virtual" BIOS and a debugger which makes testing and developing the patches easier. A generic tool also exists which they have created to retrive, modify and reflash the BIOS based on previous work by pinczakko. The second thing talked about is the structure of the BIOS which gets executed b