12.06.21
Gemini version available ♊︎“Wintel” “Secure” uEFI Firmware Used to Store Persistent Malware, and Security Theater Boot is Worthless
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
PCMag now reports (And calls out Windows! Good!) that the situation where persistent rootkit malware that doesn’t really need anything except to run once, somehow, on a Windows machine, is now being installed into the system’s uEFI firmware, where it will survive what most Windows users end up doing every time their computer ends up acting weird….nuking Windows and re-installing from scratch.
It was already so much easier for Microsoft to include “Reset this PC” than it was to fix Windows that this has been a staple for the past decade. It sometimes works, unless something has also corrupted the WIM installer image on the recovery partition, which also takes up precious SSD space.
However, with the latest threat to Windows users, which uEFI made possible (as bootkits on legacy BIOS were unheard of), no matter how many times you re-install Windows, no matter whether or not TPM or Secure Boot are on and enforced, it won’t matter. The malware isn’t running in a part of your computer that is subjected to any sort of auditable behavior.
Therefore, the only way to prevent a foothold situation is to get rid of Windows now, while it may not be too late, and replace it with GNU/Linux.
Again, most people find that their “must have” Windows software works in Wine. Sometimes Wine even resurrects programs that Windows itself has been incompatible with or partially broke years ago.
Instead of fixing Windows, Microsoft spends billions in “shadow advertising” to pay “freelance” writers to make “Linux” sound like a security disaster too, so there’s this “false equivalence” in the user’s mind.
My dad used to do the same thing to my mother when she threatened to divorce him. “You know if you leave me, your cancer will come back and there won’t be anyone to help you with that. The kids won’t be able to come back and live with me because I won’t have them”.
Like, here’s the biggest dickhead in the world, right? And mom’s 64 now and she’s fine, and I’m pushing 40, will be 40 in a couple years and some change and I’m fine, right? Bullies always use threats which turn out to be puffery. They want you to think they’re all powerful. And their antics usually get worse as they lose power.
So we should see that Microsoft is acting from a position of weakness.
There’s this whole Truman Show thing going on right now they’re up in the tower panicking because he finally realizes everything around him is fake and he needs to leave, and he finally decides to escape the island.
So all of a sudden there’s a fake nuclear power plant meltdown, and actors getting in the way of his car, and a wind storm being generated on the lake to try to scare him into giving up and thinking he was crazy, and going back to the show. And up until that point, every time he started to question the nature of things, they could always increase his fear of the unknown to overcome his curiosity, or his need to grow. And that’s exactly how abusers operate.
The very act of porting Microsoft Pretender to “Linux” is a part of this psyop.
They fund nasty trolls to imply that there is a remote technical possibility of targeting GNU/Linux users. (Technically possible, but much, much more difficult and far less pay off.)
I have another post coming about that, very shortly.
Just using some back of the napkin math, however, Windows is more than 10 times bigger than GNU/Linux after a fresh install as measured by disk footprint.
Secunia wrote in 2014 that the defect density for open source code was 0.59 defects per 1,000 lines, and for proprietary it was 0.72.
(The bonus in their reports is that the one from the prior year showed that C++ projects tended to be a much bigger security mess than C. Linux the kernel is almost entirely C. Linus was right!)
So if you assume that there’s about 10 times as much source code in Windows (which is amazing, considering that the built-in apps are useless and you don’t get a free fully-featured operating system, only SKUs with various parts of the OS disabled, and most people will try to get a different web browser, LibreOffice, and VLC anyway), and you give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not writing garbage that’s even worse than the proprietary software average (LOL), there’d still be well over 12 times as many bugs in the Windows operating system as in GNU/Linux, even though Windows doesn’t have good features and quality software included.
(It usually comes with a lot of crapware from the OEM though, and that’s a totally different story, and makes the situation worse.)
There absolutely is a security cost to leaving a ton of garbage laying around and no good security practices for software installation and package management (just a failed crApp Store with fake apps and junk), and Windows “users” (useds) are paying this price every day.
Wisdom comes by seeing bullshit, calling bullshit, and refusing to be a part of the bullshit. Software is getting to be so tertiary to what Microsoft even does to make money.
What they seem to do these days boils down to spawn camping “Linux” while they don’t even use Windows internally that much anymore, in favor of “Linux”, and suing Android OEMs -or- offering to cram pack your new phone with pestware that demands to connect to Microsoft. (Samsung)
I’m heartened that the “news” is starting to rebel against this disgusting spectacle that’s going on around Microsoft Edge lately and is no longer just calling Windows bugs a “PC problem” in every article. Hopefully, the more Microsoft tightens their grasp, the more things slip through their fingers. █
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