Does Malware Require an OS...

I was wondering, can malware support itself with no reliance on a hosts OS? A.K.A. Bare Metal Malware?

 

Welllll I've heard of rootkits that survive reformatting. So if that counts... lol sure.

 

There are bootkits that infect your MBR. I don't think those require OS.

Also, even more rare and dangerous, are ones that infect your BIOS.

 

Well I have an infector that writes a partition to USB, CD, and HDD also loads into memory at start up to cause trouble. Maybe some type of agnostic backdoor, no MBR required.
I have tried to view the partition with a hex editor and the infected device is blacklisted from hex editor access.

 

It burns itself onto every CD/DVD upon inserting a (R/RW) disc into your CD/DVD writer after it has loaded itself into memory?
Any checksum to share?

 

i would say yes, it requires one. because every malware has its target

 

No, I don't think it is doing that, but when you write to the CD-R it does too. It's not making itself part of the file your copying but precedes or follows it onto the media. Doing it's copy routine only if loaded in RAM, I guess. This would make every thing you do suspect, backups, distros, flash drives. When you do a checksum of the .iso it's good, but the media itself is infected.
If I can do some basic checks and can confirm it is what I think, I'll let you know the checksum, sure.