Secure Boot | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A team of cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of a new high-risk vulnerability affecting billions of devices worldwide—including servers and workstations, laptops, desktops, and IoT systems running nearly any Linux distribution or Windows system. Dubbed ' BootHole ' and tracked as CVE-2020-10713 , the reported vulnerability resides in the GRUB2 bootloader, which, if exploited, could potentially let attackers bypass the Secure Boot feature and gain high-privileged persistent and stealthy access to the targeted systems. Secure Boot is a security feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) that uses a bootloader to load critical components, peripherals, and the operating system while ensuring that only cryptographically signed code executes during the boot process. "One of the explicit design goals of Secure Boot is to prevent unauthorized code, even running with administrator privileges, from gaining additional privileges and pre-OS pers...

Researchers have discovered a severe vulnerability in Cisco products that could allow attackers to implant persistent backdoor on wide range devices used in enterprises and government networks, including routers, switches, and firewalls. Dubbed Thrangrycat or 😾😾😾, the vulnerability, discovered by researchers from the security firm Red Balloon and identified as CVE-2019-1649, affects multiple Cisco products that support Trust Anchor module (TAm). Trust Anchor module (TAm) is a hardware-based Secure Boot functionality implemented in almost all of Cisco enterprise devices since 2013 that ensures the firmware running on hardware platforms is authentic and unmodified. However, researchers found a series of hardware design flaws that could allow an authenticated attacker to make the persistent modification to the Trust Anchor module via FPGA bitstream modification and load the malicious bootloader. "An attacker with root privileges on the device can modify the contents of...

It's True  —  There is no such backdoor that only its creator can access. Microsoft has accidentally leaked the Secret keys that allow hackers to unlock devices protected by UEFI ( Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ) Secure Boot feature. What's even worse? It will be impossible for Microsoft to undo its leak. Secure Boot is a security feature that protects your device from certain types of malware, such as a rootkit, which can hijack your system bootloader, as well as, Secure Boot restricts you from running any non-Microsoft operating system on your device. In other words, when Secure Boot is enabled, you will only be able to boot Microsoft approved ( cryptographically signature checking ) operating systems. However, the Golden Keys disclosed by two security researchers, using alias MY123 and Slipstream , can be used to install non-Windows operating systems, say GNU/Linux or Android, on the devices protected by Secure Boot. Moreover, according to the blog po...

Windows 8 PCs contain a new technology called Secure Boot that only boots devices that have been verified by Microsoft. Also Microsoft's own Offline Defender won't boot on Windows 8 PCs with Secure Boot on. Neither will Norton's Bootable Recovery Tool. We asked the guys at FixMeStick how their external hardware-based anti-malware device can boot on brand new Windows 8 hardware with Secure boot on, as well as 10 year old PCs with 32 processors running XP. Here's their answer: 1. It got a Master Boot Record. : In other words, it boots on BIOS-based PCs, essentially all PCs prior to Windows 8. 2. and it got UEFI boot partition : It also got a UEFI boot partition, so it will boot on PCs with the latest UEFI firmware too. 3. It's 32 bit : There's a 32 bit operating system on the stick so it will work with 32 bit microprocessors. Most rescue ISOs\disks are 32 bit only, so by default they work on 32 bit processors and 64 bit processors. 4. and it's 64...