PC hardware can pose rootkit threat

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Kudos, BigThunder -- This is Serious, and...

people just ranting, or belittling serious enquiries by others should just stay off the board (or better yet, be banned).

After the story (and all these posts), I still see NOTHING approaching a viable means of testing for nor correcting possible hardware rootkits (and my guess is there probably isn't any simple way for many of them). If it's possible to install a rootkit on any firmware that's EEPROM flashable, that includes not only video cards, sound cards, modem cards, game cards and ANY other peripheral cards (like the one that adds Firewire to my computer), but also the firmware in ALL the hard drives, both internal and external, floppy or CD/DVD drives, USB controller cards, hard drive controller cards and a number of different chips and cards either attached or built-in to the motherboard, INCLUDING the System BIOS.

when I recently upgraded my (new-as-of November 20) Dell XPS 410 to Vista, part of the upgrade include a flash upgrade from Dell (I don't remember if it was done via one of the disks they shipped me or through my online connection, as I had to stay online during the whole process) to an entirely NEW BIOS version. Since that intial upgrade, I had a couple glitches that caused me to have to start over from scratch a time or two, which meant going through the entire XP installation from scratch, first, and XP was still functioning on that new BIOS version, too, so it didn't revert.

Anyway, since the upgrade, although Vista's running fine, for the most part, my system clock IS NOT keeping good time. I even changed the sync time from once a day to every 15 minutes, and it was STILL not up to snuff until I changed time servers twice until I found one that got it right (but one would THINK the Windows Server would have the right time, for one, huh?)

My Media Center is ALSO not working right under Vista, whereas I had no problems under XP, and I've yet to find anyone with a permanent FIX for that.

Like you, BigThunder, I know "just enough to get myself in trouble," too. But after working on PCs for 22.5 years now, owning 3 Macs and this being my 5th Windows machine, having made minor adjustments on motherboards (such as changing EEPROMs that are changeable by moving a switch, having installed plenty of RAM, a couple internal hard drives, several peripheral cards, and helped a number of other folks with THEIR problems, I'm still just an "intermediate user," who really has NO IDEA how to do more technical stuff, such as flashing all that firmware without going to individual product websites and having them do it for me, etc.

So, YEAH, we need serious answers, not uncalled-for DARBY-TYPE Vitriol.

Oh, and I've been a ZDNet subscriber since 1998 (5 years before I left the Mac and went back to Windows). They may not have all the answers, but they sure can keep you abreast of the issues. So at least we know this problem exists, even if it IS just one more thing to keep us awake at night, for now... And at least they DO shoot straight.

Posted by: Jeff Hayes   Posted on: 04/01/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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