Researchers have discovered what is believed to be the first in-the-wildrootkit that targets BIOS, the built-in software responsible for booting up a computer and managing communication between the machine and its attached devices.
The discovery of Mebromi is notable not because any widespread infections are anticipated – the complexity of a successful attack on the motherboard is high – but because it appears to be the first malware written for the BIOS in at least four years, Webroot researcher Marco Giuliani, who studied the threat, said in a blog post Tuesday.
The potent malware cocktail, consisting of a BIOS rootkit, an MBR (master boot record) rootkit, a kernel-mode rookit, a PE (portable executable) file infector and a trojan downloader, is designed to evade anti-virus detection.