Re: Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps

[Jim Bell]

________________________________
 From: brian carroll <electromagnetize@gmail.com>

 

>naive perhaps, though would it be possible to transmit such 'radio
>code' via a small transmitter, say at short range in another building,
>that could send a stream of infecting code into a building (and thus
>the infection could begin outside the USB framework), such as via a
>small programmed microcontroller with radio antenna, either networked
>or running autonomously (or would this be a pirate radio issue,
>closed-in on quickly by HAMs monitoring misuse of spectrum).

>further, if this radio broadcast of code were possible, one-way or
>bidirectional, what would prevent this from scaling city or region
>wide if a transmitter were overtaken and sending out signals to
>computers en masse, to reprogram firmware, targeting via equipment
>statistics or OS/hardware demographics.

It has been about 31 years since I worked at Intel; at the time they were developing the first DRAMs with 'redundancy':  The ability to swap out 'rows' and 'columns', or potentially blocks, of storage elements.   This was done to be able to drastically increase the yield of such chips:   Test programs were written to identify errors (single bits; bad rows; bad columns; bad blocks) and swap out with 'invisible' rows/columns/blocks with others.  Presumably, modern flash ROM has long used similar abilities.  If that is the case, there is some kind of ordinarily-invisible storage areas (blocks, most likely) in those flash-drives.  Such areas were sometimes 'activated' (made to appear/disappear) by out-of-spec voltages (above +5 volts), but it's possible also that reading or 'writing' combinations of pre-specified data would also do this.  It's been too long for me to give detailed assistance, but I can well imagine that 'they' are taking advantage
 of such 'features'.
         Jim Bell
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