Skip to main content

Ineffective Laptop Recovery Software + Whitelisted Persistent BIOS Rootkit = Fail!

By
Following up their bleeding edge research on bios resident malware at CanSecWest the ultra-smart guys (Alfredo and Sacco) from CoreSecurity have disclosed a significant issue with the laptop recovery software LoJack.

I have debated the effectiveness of laptop recovery software many times arguing that its cost does not justify the recovery of the hard asset (how much is laptop hardware worth vs the cost of recovery).

But now this is even worse - by having this BIOS resident software installed (or pre-installed in an estimated 60% of new laptops - Lenovo, HD, Gateway, Dell, Toshiba) there is a significant exposure to having the LoJack software modified by someone malicious. Compounding this issue is the fact that the software is already white-listed by virus vendors meaning there would be no way to prevent or detect it from occurring.

Its a bit ironic when security software exposes its paying users to much more risk that it addresses. "Get it. And get it back - twice as bad."

Comments

Laptop Recovery said…
Wonderful information ... thank you for sharing it with us!
3 August 2009 at 03:50
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-virus Statistics - Motivations

By
In a study completed and published by Avira ( http://www.avira.com/en/company_news/recognition_performance_virus_protection.html ) The results of the survey showed that for 34 percent (3,207 respondents) a long-established, trustworthy brand was key. Almost as many users, 33 percent (3,077 respondents), based their decision on the virus detection rates achieved in independent tests. Detection rates - lets call this effectiveness of the control - as this is the key metric used to measure effectiveness. This is a skewed metric as for the large majority of evaluations (ICSALabs, VB100, etc) use the "in-the-wild" or ITW list of viruses to perform the evaluations. There is no evaluation of these product's ability to respond or even detect newly released virus and malware. In all honesty really what we are dealing with here is preventative vulnerability management not virus detection and correction, and in my opinion there are four types of preventative protections required f
Post a Comment
Read more

Local Classified Penny Auction Scam

By
While there are a lot of new posts regarding the new ways to exploit people using novel techniques and 0day exploits, there continues to be a rash of tried and true methods of coercion.  I want to just walk through a simple example and reflect on how effective these methods continue to be. Many people turn toward online classified sites to buy and sell items online.  This example starts with kijiji.ca which even I've used on occasion to find used electronics and other items.  Doing a search on the site for a " Samsung Galaxy Note 2 " returns a posting from today with someone selling one for an unreasonably priced unit. $125 for a $500 phone?, but what if it's for real?  No harm in just asking some simple questions.  Email sent with some obvious questions regarding the condition and location. About an hour passes before I get a response from what appears to be a legit seller. Notice no answer to the questions I asked, but a friendly pointer at where th
14 comments
Read more

OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI and OSX - Creative Storage - Part II

By
In part I of this post, I looked at the simple steps required to setup a relatively simple storage solution using OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI and OSX. This was about a month ago, and I've made some significant changes on how this is used for me. At the end of the last post I left off on the part dealing with configuration of the iSCSI initiator side of the solution. I stopped here because there were some issues related to the installation and use of the software. The iSCSI initiator that I was using was Studio Network Solutions GlobalSAN initiator (version 3.3.0.43) which is used to allow for connections to their products. This software will also allow for connections to ANY iSCSI target! After the configuration of the iSCSI target on the ZFS pool, and installation of the client it was trivial to get the connection established with the storage pool, and it showed up in OSX as a raw disk which had not been formatted. I proceeded to format the disk as HFS+ and it then mounted as a lo
1 comment
Read more