Stealthy UEFI malware bypassing Secure Boot enabled by unpatchable Windows flaw
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Researchers on Wednesday announced a major cybersecurity find—the world’s first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer’s boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows. Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware is what’s known as a UEFI bootkit. These sophisticated pieces of malware hijack the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface —the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer. As the mechanism that bridges a PC’s device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI [...]