badBIOS: airgap-jumping malware that may use ultrasonic networking to communicate

Security researcher Dragos Ruiu has been painstakingly untangling a weird, scary piece of malicious software that compromises the BIOS of the computers it attacks, allowing it to infect machines with different operating systems. He's dubbed it "badBIOS" and has seen it infect machines that aren't connected to the Internet. It appears that its initial vector may be a USB exploit, spreading by memory stick, but after that, it appears that it continues to communicate with other infected machines by ultrasonic networking through its hosts' mics and speakers (!). On Ars Technica, Dan Goodin has a deep dive into the strange, freaky world of badBIOS.



"The airgapped machine is acting like it's connected to the Internet," he said. "Most of the problems we were having is we were slightly disabling bits of the components of the system. It would not let us disable some things. Things kept getting fixed automatically as soon as we tried to break them. It was weird."

Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps [Dan Goodin/Ars Technica]