The Hacker News - Most Trusted Cyber Security and Computer Security Analysis: UEFI

Commercially developed FinFisher surveillanceware has been upgraded to infect Windows devices using a  UEFI  (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) bootkit that leverages a trojanized Windows Boot Manager, marking a shift in infection vectors that allow it to elude discovery and analysis. Detected in the wild since 2011, FinFisher (aka FinSpy or Wingbird) is a spyware toolset for Windows, macOS, and Linux developed by Anglo-German firm Gamma International and supplied exclusively to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But like with NSO Group's Pegasus, the software has also been used to  spy on Bahraini activists  in the past allegedly and delivered as part of  spear-phishing campaigns  in September 2017. FinFisher is equipped to harvest user credentials, file listings, sensitive documents, record keystrokes, siphon email messages from Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail, and Icedove, intercept Skype contacts, chats, calls and transferred files, and capture audio and video

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed a chain of vulnerabilities affecting the BIOSConnect feature within Dell Client BIOS that could be abused by a privileged network adversary to gain arbitrary code execution at the BIOS/UEFI level of the affected device. "As the attacker has the ability to remotely execute code in the pre-boot environment, this can be used to subvert the operating system and undermine fundamental trust in the device," researchers from enterprise device security firm Eclypsium said . "The virtually unlimited control over a device that this attack can provide makes the fruit of the labor well worth it for the attacker." In all, the flaws affect 128 Dell models spanning across consumer and business laptops, desktops, and tablets, totalling an estimated 30 million individual devices. Worse, the weaknesses also impact computers that have  Secure Boot  enabled, a security feature designed to prevent  rootkits from being installed  at boot

TrickBot , one of the most notorious and adaptable malware botnets in the world, is expanding its toolset to set its sights on firmware vulnerabilities to potentially deploy bootkits and take complete control of an infected system. The new functionality, dubbed " TrickBoot " by Advanced Intelligence (AdvIntel) and Eclypsium, makes use of readily available tools to check devices for well-known vulnerabilities that can allow attackers to inject malicious code in the UEFI/BIOS firmware of a device, granting the attackers an effective mechanism of persistent malware storage. "This marks a significant step in the evolution of TrickBot as UEFI level implants are the deepest, most powerful, and stealthy form of bootkits," the researchers said. "By adding the ability to canvas victim devices for specific UEFI/BIOS firmware vulnerabilities, TrickBot actors are able to target specific victims with firmware-level persistence that survives re-imaging or even device br

Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a rare kind of potentially dangerous malware that targets a machine's booting process to drop persistent malware. The campaign involved the use of a compromised  UEFI  (or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) containing a malicious implant, making it the  second known public case  where a UEFI rootkit has been used in the wild. According to  Kaspersky , the rogue UEFI firmware images were modified to incorporate several malicious modules, which were then used to drop malware on victim machines in a series of targeted cyberattacks directed against diplomats and members of an NGO from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Calling the malware framework " MosaicRegressor ," Kaspersky researchers Mark Lechtik, Igor Kuznetsov, and Yury Parshin said a telemetry analysis revealed several dozen victims between 2017 and 2019, all of whom had some ties to North Korea. UEFI is a firmware interface and a replacement for BIOS that improves security, e