Stumbled tonight on a video about UEFI malware (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb3Q-CkXfVw). Seems to be a significant problem: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/s ... pc-models/.
Unlikely but possible that this could be relevant to my woes with this laptop since last weekend. A good friend of mine was throwing away his old (~8 years?) Dell laptop, and I decided to salvage it by replacing the RAM and NVMe drive and installing Linux. (I considered updating the BIOS but was lazy and, perhaps, insufficiently paranoid.) Seemed to work well for months, but my BIOS/UEFI struggles this past week make me a bit suspicious now, esp. seeing messages like these:
My friend -- originally from China but living in the US for many years -- traveled between the US and China a few times, likely with this laptop, so there have presumably been opportunities for state actors to install backdoors into his UEFI. Hmmm.
Unlikely but possible that this could be relevant to my woes with this laptop since last weekend. A good friend of mine was throwing away his old (~8 years?) Dell laptop, and I decided to salvage it by replacing the RAM and NVMe drive and installing Linux. (I considered updating the BIOS but was lazy and, perhaps, insufficiently paranoid.) Seemed to work well for months, but my BIOS/UEFI struggles this past week make me a bit suspicious now, esp. seeing messages like these:
Code:
Jul 07 17:13:26 trudel kernel: MDS CPU bug present and SMT on, data leak possible. See https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/hw-vuln/mds.html for more details.Jul 07 17:13:26 trudel kernel: MMIO Stale Data CPU bug present and SMT on, data leak possible. See https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/hw-vuln/processor_mmio_stale_data.html for more details.Statistics: Posted by JamesLavin — 2024-07-08 04:42 — Replies 44 — Views 729