A Day After "UEFI 9/11": UEFI Secure Boot Bypass
In the news today (right now), as published in the past few hours:
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Introducing HybridPetya: Petya/NotPetya copycat with UEFI Secure Boot bypass
ESET Research has discovered HybridPetya, on the VirusTotal sample sharing platform. It is a copycat of the infamous Petya/NotPetya malware, adding the capability of compromising UEFI-based systems and weaponizing CVE‑2024‑7344 to bypass UEFI Secure Boot on outdated systems.
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HybridPetya: (Proof-of-concept?) ransomware can bypass UEFI Secure Boot
ESET researchers have discovered HybridPetya, a bootkit-and-ransomware combo that’s a copycat of the infamous Petya/NotPetya malware, augmented with the capability of compromising UEFI-based systems and weaponizing CVE-2024-7344 to bypass UEFI Secure Boot on outdated systems.
The sample was uploaded from Poland to the malware-scanning platform VirusTotal, and ESET telemetry shows no signs of the malware being used in the wild yet.
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New HybridPetya Ransomware Bypasses UEFI Secure Boot With CVE-2024-7344 Exploit
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new ransomware strain dubbed HybridPetya that resembles the notorious Petya/NotPetya malware, while also incorporating the ability to bypass the Secure Boot mechanism in Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) systems using a now-patched vulnerability disclosed earlier this year.
Slovakian cybersecurity company ESET said the samples were uploaded to the VirusTotal platform in February 2025.
"HybridPetya encrypts the Master File Table, which contains important metadata about all the files on NTFS-formatted partitions," security researcher Martin Smolár said. "Unlike the original Petya/NotPetya, HybridPetya can compromise modern UEFI-based systems by installing a malicious EFI application onto the EFI System Partition."
In other words, the deployed UEFI application is the central component that takes care of encrypting the Master File Table (MFT) file, which contains metadata related to all the files on the NTFS-formatted partition.
So much for security rather than an illusion of it. █