Mebromi, a bios-flashing trojan

These are so few and far between it seems worth mentioning.

http://blogs.norman.com/2011/malware-detection-team/mebromi-a-bios-flashing-trojan

 

Yeah rare indeed, & someone was just asking about such a thing the other day in here !

Thanks for posting

 

Nice. So we need to hunt for a smple of it now!!

 

Damn, that is dangerous.

 

Indeed.

 

Nah, 64bit users have KPP to prevent this.

 

Either way it can't just go straight for the BIOS. If the files it uses were blacklisted by your AV you'd be fine. And there's plenty of ways to protect outside of blacklisting, as everyone knows.

Removal would be to reflash your BIOS.

 

I meant when infected, but good points.

 

I had that Win98 virus they mentioned in the article. It was fun fixing it LOL

 

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/bios-threat-showing-again

 

Let's assume all other protections fail. Does password-protecting the BIOS defeat this threat?

 

IDK. I doubt it, you odn't need a password to flash your BIOS just Admin access.

I have mine password protected though.

 

motherboard makers just need to implement a bios 'write' switch similar to some USB's and job done

 

There's a million ways to mitigate this. The deeper a virus wants to implant itself the more specific it has to be, the more complex it has to be, and the more rights it needs to have.

 

Return of the BIOS trojans

Even survives a hard drive swap if it is an Award BIOS.

Article

 

BIOS Trojan Chinese AV vendor 360 has discovered a virus in the wild that makes its home in a computer's BIOS, where it remains hidden from conventional virus scanners. The contaminant, called Mebromi, first checks to see whether the victim's computer uses an Award BIOS. If so, it uses the CBROM command-line tool to hook its extension into the BIOS. The next time the system boots, the BIOS extension adds additional code to the hard drive's master boot record (MBR) in order to infect the winlogon.exe / winnt.exe processes on Windows XP and 2003 / Windows 2000 before Windows boots.

The next time Windows launches, the malicious code downloads a rootkit to prevent the drive's MBR from being cleaned by a virus scanner. But even if the drive is cleaned, the whole infection routine is repeated the next time the BIOS module is booted. Mebromi can also survive a change of hard drive. If the computer doesn't use an Award BIOS, the contaminant simply infects the MBR.

The idea of hooking a malicious routine into the BIOS is not new and offers attackers the advantage of keeping hidden from the virus scanner. In 1999, the CIH virus attempted to manipulate its victim's BIOS, but it had only destructive effects: the BIOS was overwritten, and the computer would no longer boot. In 2009, security researchers presented a scenario in which a rootkit was anchored in the BIOS. But so far, no BIOS contaminant has managed to become widespread, possibly because there are simply too many different motherboards – and therefore too many different ways of flashing the BIOS.


http://dereferer.ws/?http://www.h-on...s-1341421.html

 

http://blog.webroot.com/2011/09/13/mebromi-the-first-bios-rootkit-in-the-wild/

 

BIOS rootkit found in the wild

I was hoping this would never happen but;

http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=1837

 

Can an infector be traced to PC-zero (patient-zero)?

I believe there is a write block switch, but it is within the BIOS, a part of the code to disable further flashing attempts though. Other BIOS malware papers have discussed it.

Ways to tell if you are infected:
Clean the MBR and you get reinfected on next boot I guess.

What rootkit or techniques is it using?

 

Looks like a duplicate, invalid link to me, but great articles nonetheless.