CosmicStrand is the latest in a string of sophisticated malware that reaches hardware bits you'd think were much harder to breach than your typical OS installation. But harder to breach doesn't mean unreachable, as any cybersecurity researcher will tell you. Researchers have recently found strands of a particularly nifty piece of malware lurking in both ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards
based on Intel's H81 chipset. CosmicStrand has evolved since its first appearance back in 2016, and it's currently unclear if the breakout is confined to both companies' offerings of the larger motherboard market yet holds a darker revelation.
Researchers from Kaspersky labs found the malware stranded in the motherboards' Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) -
their boot sector, so to speak, which is tasked with identifying, verifying and booting up all the connected hardware bits. From simple fans spinning up all the way to your PC's overclocking capabilities
on the latest and greatest gaming CPUs - it all leads to your PC's BIOS. For the sake of clarity,
this isn't the first such threat discovered - but one is already too many, and it does add to possible infection vectors.
Being the first thing to run within your system - long before any antivirus solution you might have can even be loaded into memory - BIOS-borne malware can be exceedingly difficult to remove. It can evade most antivirus applications, can't be deleted by a fresh OS install, and it also naturally survives storage wipes, three of the most common ways of getting rid of security threats such as these.
