The AMI BIOS breach of 2013

Dave Farquhar security , , , , ,

A security professional’s nightmare happened to AMI this week. Tons of confidential data, including the source code for the UEFI BIOS for Intel Ivy Bridge-based systems and an AMI-owned private key for digital signatures, turned up on a wide-open FTP server for all comers to download anonymously. This AMI BIOS breach has numerous implications.

The implications are nearly limitless. To a malware author, this is like finding a hollowed-out book at a garage sale stuffed with $100 bills with a 25-cent price sticker on the front. If you’re a budding security professional, count on being asked in job interviews why you need to protect confidential information. The next time you get that question, here’s a story you can cite.

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How I once took down a network, including a radio station

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Retro Computing, War Stories , , , , , ,

I met up Monday night with some other security professionals for some emergency networking of the professional kind. One of the attendees, a penetration tester, had a little incident where he took down a production system when he conducted his penetration test. The system owners were a bit arrogant, and, well, they paid for it.

I’ve taken down a network too, but in my case it wasn’t something security-related. No, in my case, I was a 20-year-old desktop support technician working in a college computer lab, making an honest mistake.

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My earliest memory of using a computer

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , ,
My earliest memory of using a computer

Gizmodo asked this weekend about earliest computer memories, and illustrated it with a computer that sported a 3.5″ floppy drive. Young whippersnappers.

My first memory was in 1981 or 1982. Dad went to see one of his coworkers in his home, and brought me along. He had a son a few years older than me, probably about 12 years old, and there in the living room was something I’d never seen before, connected to a television and sitting on a desk. “What’s that?” I asked.

“This is a computer,” he said. Then he inserted a Choplifter cartridge and taught me how to play. Read more

A quick fix for the Insignia NS20EM50A13 monitor’s biggest annoyance

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I’ve written about the Insignia NS20EM50A13 monitor before. It’s a reasonably good low-end monitor with the annoying tendency to change the video input back to VGA any time your system goes to sleep or changes from text to graphics mode. I accidentally discovered this week–after using the monitor for months–that if you push the OK button on the front of the monitor, it brings up the input menu, allowing you to quickly flip it back to DVI without fumbling through the menus.

I still wish the monitor would let me set the default to DVI and make it stay that way, but this is an acceptable workaround for the price, at least for me.