Security News
An unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor has been attributed to a new kind of sophisticated UEFI firmware rootkit called CosmicStrand. "The rootkit is located in the firmware images of Gigabyte or ASUS motherboards, and we noticed that all these images are related to designs using the H81 chipset," Kaspersky researchers said in a new report published today.
Chinese-speaking hackers have been using since at least 2016 malware that lies virtually undetected in the firmware images for some motherboards, one of the most persistent threats commonly known as a UEFI rootkit. It is unclear how the threat actor managed to inject the rootkit into the firmware images of the target machines but researchers found the malware on machines with ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards.
Security researchers have spotted some fresh flaws in Lenovo laptops just months after the vendor patched another batch, with the PC maker fixing a trio of vulnerabilities flagged up by ESET this week. The vulnerabilities reported were buffer overflows in the UEFI firmware.
Consumer electronics maker Lenovo on Tuesday rolled out fixes to contain three security flaws in its UEFI firmware affecting over 70 product models. "The vulnerabilities can be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution in the early phases of the platform boot, possibly allowing the attackers to hijack the OS execution flow and disable some important security features," Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET said in a series of tweets.
The UEFI firmware used in several laptops made by Lenovo is vulnerable to three buffer overflow vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to hijack the startup routine of Windows installations. Lenovo has issued a security advisory disclosing three medium severity vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2022-1890, CVE-2022-1891, and CVE-2022-1892.
Three high-impact Unified Extensible Firmware Interface security vulnerabilities have been discovered impacting various Lenovo consumer laptop models, enabling malicious actors to deploy and execute firmware implants on the affected devices. Tracked as CVE-2021-3970, CVE-2021-3971, and CVE-2021-3972, the latter two "Affect firmware drivers originally meant to be used only during the manufacturing process of Lenovo consumer notebooks," ESET researcher Martin Smolár said in a report published today.
Lenovo has published a security advisory on vulnerabilities that impact its Unified Extensible Firmware Interface loaded on at least 100 of its laptop models. A total of three security issues were discovered, two of them allowing an attacker to disable the protection for the SPI flash memory chip where the UEFI firmware is stored and to turn off the UEFI Secure Boot feature, which ensures the system loads at boot time only code trusted by the Original Equipment Manufacturer.
Lenovo has published a security advisory on vulnerabilities that impact its Unified Extensible Firmware Interface loaded on at least 100 of its laptop models. A total of three security issues were discovered, two of them allowing an attacker to disable the protection for the SPI flash memory chip where the UEFI firmware is stored and to turn off the UEFI Secure Boot feature, which ensures the system loads at boot time only code trusted by the Original Equipment Manufacturer.
Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed 16 new high-severity vulnerabilities in various implementations of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface firmware impacting multiple HP enterprise devices. The shortcomings, which have CVSS scores ranging from 7.5 to 8.8, have been uncovered in HP's UEFI firmware.
HP has disclosed 16 high-impact UEFI firmware vulnerabilities that could allow threat actors to infect devices with malware that gain high privileges and remain undetectable by installed security software. SSM. CVE-2021-23924: heap buffer overflow leading to arbitrary code execution.