4 reasons BadBIOS isn't real
If you haven't been following the story of Dragos Ruiu's BadBIOS tale the last two weeks, you've missed a compelling saga and an opportunity to find out how much you really know about malware.
A well-respected computer security researcher, Ruiu says he's found the single nastiest malware program of all time. Purportedly, it lives in the BIOS, survives BIOS reflashes, readily works cross-platform (Windows 8, BSD, OS X), and -- get this -- communicates with other infected computers using high-frequency sound waves above the range of human hearing. It renders CD-ROM drives and USB drives unusable, and it can erase its tracks when forensically analyzed.
People following this story fall into a few different camps. Many believe everything he says -- or at least most of it -- is true. Others think he's perpetrating a huge social engineering experiment, to see what he can get the world and the media to swallow. A third camp believes he's well-intentioned, but misguided due to security paranoia nurtured through the years.