New Flaw in Acer Laptops Could Let Attackers Disable Secure Boot Protection
Nov 29, 2022
 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.   The PC maker described the vulnerability as an issue that "may allow changes to Secure Boot settings by creating NVRAM variables." Credited with  discovering  the flaw is ESET researcher Martin Smolár, who previously disclosed  similar bugs  in Lenovo computers.  Disabling Secure Boot, an integrity mechanism that guarantees that only trusted software is loaded during system startup, enables a malicious actor to tamper with  boot loaders , leading to severe consequences.  This includes  granting  the attacker complete control over the operating system loading process as well as "disable or bypass protections t...