Are there still viruses that can infect your Bios?

[btcomm1]

I was just wondering what viruses could still do that if any and also if a virus infects your boot sector and you format your main partition it can still be left before right? What can do you do to get a virus out of your boot sector?


Topic moved from Software for Windows to Security.

AnandTech Moderator
mechBgon

 

[Nothinman]

It's possible to flash your BIOS and write to the MBR on any disk from the running OS so it's possible but they're extremely rare these days because they're a lot more difficult to write and malicious code in the firmware or MBR can do a lot less than a hidden process inside of the OS.

 

[hans007]

I'm pretty sure its a no, since windows NT and up dont have direct access to hardware.

Intel motherboards, have this thing where it will write a bios flashing program into some special boot sector area (patition magic does something like that as well), so I suppose its possible someone could write a virus that would load into that area and then flash your bios as well.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm pretty sure its a no, since windows NT and up dont have direct access to hardware.

Sure they do, they can't issue raw commands to the controller but they can write to anywhere on the disk that they want as long as they're run with admin priviledges.