A whole lot of Gigabyte motherboards weak to Safe Boot assault

Crack open your desktop PC for a second. No rush, I’ll wait. Are you trying in there? Good. Do you see a Gigabyte motherboard? Okay, now peek below the CPU cooler. I’ll wait once more. Okay, see that CPU? If it’s an Intel processor from eighth to eleventh generations (2017 to 2021), you may want a brand new BIOS replace… which can or could not exist. Oh expensive.

Researchers at Binarly and Carnegie Mellon College disclosed 4 deep firmware points to Gigabyte again in April, which may enable attackers to bypass Safe Boot on a whole lot of Gigabyte motherboard fashions. These compromised variations of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI, additionally generally known as by the outdated time period BIOS) can be utilized to run code in a pre-boot atmosphere, primarily compromising the pc lengthy earlier than Home windows or one other working system boots.

In accordance with BleepingComputer, about 240 Gigabyte motherboard fashions with Intel chipsets use the American Megatrends elements affected by this firmware, plus tons of gadgets from different producers that aren’t at the moment disclosed. Gigabyte already patched the problem on some affected motherboards by way of the June BIOS replace. However given the age of those PCs, a lot of them are out of service, which means they’re not scheduled to ever get UEFI/BIOS updates to repair the issue. That’s… an issue.

Gigabyte issued a safety bulletin displaying which of the affected methods, by chipset, have been patched. About half are previous the Finish Of Life service date, for which Gigabyte recommends that customers “Contact the FAE for help.” FAE stands for Discipline Utility Engineer, principally a extra technical form of company salesperson who provides extremely specialised service after {hardware} has been purchased and put in.

In case you purchased a Gigabyte motherboard at a retail retailer, or a PC from a system integrator with a Gigabyte motherboard inside, you don’t have a Discipline Utility Engineer. Studying between the strains, Gigabyte is principally saying “purchase a brand new motherboard.” (Or, contemplating how outdated a few of them are, “purchase a brand new laptop.”) Which, to be truthful, is just about the identical message it’s sending to company shoppers, too.