• mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      16·
      4 months ago

      The truly paranoid hackers will even unsolder the motherboard-level tracking hardware that the manufacturer adds. Cuz that shit runs below even the OS, and will track you even when you’re using something like TailsOS.

      Even basic BIOS settings can be easy to miss, like Dell/HP/etc using Absolute Persistence/Computrace tracking. That one is particularly common with refurbished corporate fleet machines, because corporate IT will enable it to be able to track employees’ laptops. Then IT will upgrade the office computers, sell the old ones off to an refurbisher, and then the refurbisher never bothers disabling it when they’re prepping the machines for resale.

      And old corporate fleet machines are extremely popular with hackers, (ThinkPad and ToughBook, for example), because they tend to be decent hardware for super cheap. But it means that the machines are still phoning home to Dell/HP/etc regardless of what OS the new user installs on them. Even completely swapping out the drives (ensuring a clean OS install) won’t solve it, because it’s happening directly at the BIOS level. And because of Persistence, even wiping the BIOS isn’t a guarantee. Because it will simply reinstall itself back onto the BIOS as soon as you connect a drive that has Persistence embedded on it.

    • A404@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      4 months ago

      it is possible that they used a bare metal machine for testing purposes, that or this person was just a skiddie.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    121·
    4 months ago

    Oh, but I’m a crazy conspiracy theorist when I tell people something like this almost certainly exists…!

    … god fucking damnit.

    Yeah. Yeah this is what the TPMv2 push was for.

    This is why dual booting is always impossible in practice, because Windows can rewrite the boot sector, whenever it wants, and the Pluton system allows Windows to have an effectively below ring 0 level of access to the kernel, and… you cannot audit this.

    https://en.ittrip.xyz/windows11/pluton-firmware-event

    Windows 11: Bonus Combo Bundle with unremovable NSA rootkit!

    Its for your health!

    … they never needed to do this, it makes and it made no sense to throw away so much goodwill/reputation by just declaring the vast majority of the worlds pcs are now e-waste, upgrade to our new hardware standard for secure computing!

    The only explanation that could ever make sense was that they wanted total control. Because its insane brand suicide from a purely capitalistic pov, the juice is not worth that hard of a squeeze.

    Fucking… Windows is malware, by the FBI’s own guidelines for that from not too many years back.

    … they just applied the same approach they did to making Xboxes non hard-moddable… to all PC hardware.

    Make it so the system physically cannot function if you remove or even poke the part you’d need to poke or remove, once it has their software on it.

    People think the Israeli pager thing was a well done supply chain attack.

    … MSFT invented this shit.

    Used to work for em, had a veteran co worker tell me about the one time he got deployed to Saudi Arabia to flash the bios of hardware destined to be installed in Saddam’s CnC/Air Defense systems.

    And that was for Gulf War 1, by the way.

    As far as I know, that is still fucking classified, because I’ve never heard anyone else talk about that, anywhere, ever.

    … fuck.

    Doesn’t matter now, I guess.