If not impossible, at least very strange that he has not done more research to verify this (would be easy to do with an oscilloscope attached to the speaker output).

Seems like trolling or some form of paranoia.

Dumping the BIOS also comes to mind.

How are you supposed to dump it? It's like hacking slot machines: you can always make a rootkit which returns exactly the data you're expecting...

Using any random quad-SPI programmer and soldering it to the chip that contains your BIOS. If dragosr is suspecting a BIOS malware, I can't understand that he hasn't done that yet. From what I've read on his Twitter and Facebook account, he would have spent 3 years investigating this malware and is just now thinking of dumping the ROM of his "infected" USB devices.

Smells fishy to me.

What if the BIOS code dynamically compresses/decompresses crypts/decrypts code and data?

You then put the code on another machine and you are in the same situation, it seems to me like a vicious circle if you don't know where to cut.

That sounds fairly unlikely (the BIOS does executes some code from PCI devices, but he says this happens on a machine without any weird PCI device, and PCI ROMs can be dumped too). We would not have to discuss whether this is the case if BIOS dumps turned out to be different. The issue is that 3 years after discovering the malware, he hasn't even tried to dump his BIOS.

Compression and encryption at this stage would be obfuscation more than anything else, and it's the job of malware researchers to break these kind of obfuscation layer. But again, we have no proof of this even being present.

The BIOS is not a black box that can't be analyzed.

Presumably that's atypical behavior for a BIOS, so an analysis of the dumped firmware should turn up where it's getting the location of and method to decode the data. That would give you enough to keep digging.

With many (most?) desktop motherboards, the flash chip is desolderable and can usually be taken out and read on a dedicated flash reader if you have the equipment. There would be no way for the rootkit to bypass that.

You can, you know, remove it and dump it with an eprom/flash programmer...

Yet, even these programmers are not directly wired to the transistors holding the individual bits and bytes. I would not be surprised if there's a way to manipulate the internal logic of an EEPROM chip, too.

If the BIOS (or some commonly used FPGA) already have builtin some kind of backdoor could be used for this. Now, if it was over a hardware backdoor in so many models it should be pretty widespread.

http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/05/bogus-story-no-chinese-bac... http://news.softpedia.com/news/Secret-3G-Radio-in-Every-Inte...

> Some of dragosr's claims/suspicions come off as next to impossible.

Which ones? The technical aspects are all known to be practical. The only thing odd is that a reasonably sophisticated and determined attacker is seemingly targeting him specifically and no one else.

Or else he simply picked up the malware simply by borrowing a usb key from someone else who'd been infected. I bet the majority of security researchers are only a couple of hops on their network of acquaintances from people who are pretty much guaranteed to be targets of <pick your state security agency of choice> and they would certainly have the resources to develop something like this if they chose to.

We know that Stuxnet spread beyond it's intended target - that's how it was discovered by the wider security community in the first place. Malware this pernicious could spread fairly stealthily through a large number of people without being noticed I'd imagine.

(If it really is using high frequency audio to leak data then that would be strong evidence that it was originally designed to target some group using air gapped computer networks to protect their high grade information. If your top secret & merely secret grade computers are laptops in the same room & they can communicate over a back channel like this then suddenly your air gapped computer network isn't cut off from the internet any more!)

> The technical aspects are all known to be practical.

No, they aren't. Not by a long shot. They sound vaguely similar to some that are however, so people are overlooking the details that would take this from advanced malware to hollywood fantasy.

Unless you care to explain which parts are not practical, and which details are being overlooked, what you have here is literally the opposite of credibility. You have deliberately made yourself non-credible through your anonymous cowardice.

Please explain this one:

Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed

It is explained. HF audio via speakers and microphones. In other words, a modem. Your username is highly ironic.

> Are you just assuming these are laptops with a battery?

Did you even read the article? It's a laptop. That would be the safe assumption, anyway. Laptops far out-stripped desktop sales years ago, they're what most work happens on now.

> And saying that computers are communicating by speakers and microphones over long distances (i.e. > a few inches) is patently ridiculous.

It's not. I've done it myself. Go grab a couple laptops and some PSK31 software and you can do it, too.

My main question was regarding the power cords not being plugged in but apparently these are laptops.

As for communications via speakers and microphones, that makes as much sense as any other outrageously insane theory I've ever heard.

> power cables

Keep in mind he's talking about laptops that have batteries.