Glupteba Botnet Evades Detection with Undocumented UEFI Bootkit

The Glupteba botnet has been found to incorporate a previously undocumented Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) bootkit feature, adding another layer of sophistication and stealth to the malware. "This bootkit can intervene and control the [operating system] boot process, enabling Glupteba to hide itself and create a stealthy persistence that can be extremely difficult to

Critical Boot Loader Vulnerability in Shim Impacts Nearly All Linux Distros

The maintainers of shim have released version 15.8 to address six security flaws, including a critical bug that could pave the way for remote code execution under specific circumstances. Tracked as CVE-2023-40547 (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability could be exploited to achieve a Secure Boot bypass. Bill Demirkapi of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) has been&

Pro-Iranian Hacker Group Targeting Albania with No-Justice Wiper Malware

The recent wave of cyber attacks targeting Albanian organizations involved the use of a wiper called No-Justice. The findings come from cybersecurity company ClearSky, which said the Windows-based malware "crashes the operating system in a way that it cannot be rebooted." The intrusions have been attributed to an Iranian “psychological operation group” known as Homeland

LogoFAIL: UEFI Vulnerabilities Expose Devices to Stealth Malware Attacks

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) code from various independent firmware/BIOS vendors (IBVs) has been found vulnerable to potential attacks through high-impact flaws in image parsing libraries embedded into the firmware. The shortcomings, collectively labeled LogoFAIL by Binarly, "can be used by threat actors to deliver a malicious payload and bypass Secure Boot, Intel

NSA Releases Guide to Combat Powerful BlackLotus Bootkit Targeting Windows Systems

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) on Thursday released guidance to help organizations detect and prevent infections of a Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) bootkit called BlackLotus. To that end, the agency is recommending that "infrastructure owners take action by hardening user executable policies and monitoring the integrity of the boot partition." BlackLotus is an advanced 

New Flaw in Acer Laptops Could Let Attackers Disable Secure Boot Protection

Acer has released a firmware update to address a security vulnerability that could be potentially weaponized to turn off UEFI Secure Boot on affected machines. Tracked as CVE-2022-4020, the high-severity vulnerability affects five different models that consist of Aspire A315-22, A115-21, and A315-22G, and Extensa EX215-21 and EX215-21G. <!--adsense--> The PC maker described the vulnerability as

New UEFI Firmware Flaws Reported in Several Lenovo Notebook Models

PC maker Lenovo has addressed yet another set of three shortcomings in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware affecting several Yoga, IdeaPad, and ThinkBook devices. "The vulnerabilities allow disabling UEFI Secure Boot or restoring factory default Secure Boot databases (incl. dbx): all simply from an OS," Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET explained in a series of tweets. UEFI

Researchers Uncover UEFI Secure Boot Bypass in 3 Microsoft Signed Boot Loaders

A security feature bypass vulnerability has been uncovered in three signed third-party Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot loaders that allow bypass of the UEFI Secure Boot feature. "These vulnerabilities can be exploited by mounting the EFI System Partition and replacing the existing bootloader with the vulnerable one, or modifying a UEFI variable to load the vulnerable loader

Unpatched Critical Flaws Disclosed in U-Boot Bootloader for Embedded Devices

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two unpatched security vulnerabilities in the open-source U-Boot boot loader. The issues, which were uncovered in the IP defragmentation algorithm implemented in U-Boot by NCC Group, could be abused to achieve arbitrary out-of-bounds write and denial-of-service (DoS). U-Boot is a boot loader used in Linux-based embedded systems such as ChromeOS as well as