The bar for that kind of access is high and would likely require exploiting one or more critical other vulnerabilities elsewhere that would already put a user at considerable risk. The second instance was UEFI malware that security firm Kaspersky discovered on diplomatic figures' computers in Asia.Īll three of the Lenovo vulnerabilities discovered by ESET require local access, meaning that the attacker must already have control over the vulnerable machine with unfettered privileges.
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Advertisementįurther Reading Custom-made UEFI bootkit found lurking in the wildThe only two other documented cases of malicious UEFI firmware being used in the wild are LoJax, which was written by the Russian state hacker group known under multiple names, including Sednit, Fancy Bear, or APT 28. It allows hackers to run malicious firmware when a machine is put into system management mode, a high-privilege operating mode typically used by hardware manufacturers for low-level system management.
#LENOVO DRIVER UPDATE SERIAL#
Hackers can exploit these buggy drivers to disable protections, including UEFI secure boot, BIOS control register bits, and protected range register, which are baked into the serial peripheral interface (SPI) and designed to prevent unauthorized changes to the firmware it runs.Īfter discovering and analyzing the vulnerabilities, researchers from security firm ESET found a third vulnerability, CVE-2021-3970. Lenovo engineers inadvertently included the drivers in the production BIOS images without being properly deactivated. Two of the vulnerabilities-tracked as CVE-2021-3971 and CVE-2021-3972-reside in UEFI firmware drivers intended for use only during the manufacturing process of Lenovo consumer notebooks. Because the UEFI resides in a flash chip on the motherboard, infections are difficult to detect and even harder to remove.
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As the first piece of software to run when virtually any modern machine is turned on, it’s the initial link in the security chain. Short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the UEFI is the software that bridges a computer’s device firmware with its operating system.
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Three vulnerabilities affecting more than 1 million laptops can give hackers the ability to modify a computer’s UEFI.
#LENOVO DRIVER UPDATE INSTALL#
Lenovo has released security updates for more than 100 laptop models to fix critical vulnerabilities that make it possible for advanced hackers to surreptitiously install malicious firmware that can be next to impossible to remove or, in some cases, to detect.