Attacks before system startup

http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/8228/Attacks_before_system_startup

 

I haven´t read everything yet, but I thought this was a thing of the past, because of PatchGuard and Driver Signing?
If I´m correct, it´s not that easy anymore to load a malicious driver on Win 64 bit.

 

Not quite right. You should read the article it is nicely explained.

 

Here is a quote:
"It comes as no surprise that, as UEFI became universally implemented, it attracted the interest of independent researchers as a potential attack vector (one, two, three). The list of possible penetration points is quite extensive and includes compromising (injecting, replacing or infecting) OS boot loaders and EFI, compromising UEFI drivers, directly accessing SPI Flash from the operating system and many others. In the case of booting in UEFI+Legacy (CSM) mode, old methods of infecting the system used by bootkit developers remain effective. It is also quite obvious that if the pre-boot execution environment is compromised, all the Windows security mechanisms, such as Patch Guard, driver signature verification etc., are rendered useless."