Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps

Ars describes Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps. The article is a little technical, but the story is scary.

"In the following months, Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed. Further investigation soon showed that the list of affected operating systems also included multiple variants of Windows and Linux."

"Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps."

1 comment:

Karl said...

I remember there was an application which turned your monitor into a radio transmitter, which I thought was pretty cool. But that stopped working with the decline of CRT monitors.

Computers (and most electronic devices) leak all sorts of EM noise though. If you are creative it is just a matter of experimentation to make it do something systematic.