There are lots of ways to hack a PC. You can exploit software vulnerabilities. You can put malware on a USB drive and drop it in a parking lot for some unsuspecting office worker to pick up and plug in. Or you can turn an operating system's features against itself, strategically manipulating them to gain control. But an expanding threat now has Microsoft rethinking some of its most foundational PC defenses.
Today the company is announcing a new hardware and system architecture feature known as secured-core PC, aimed at addressing attacks against firmware, the foundational code that coordinates hardware and software. Firmware has long been a hacker target, in part because it's typically written by hardware manufacturers rather than operating system developers, and frequently lacks basic protections. Windows runs atop all different types of firmware across the assorted PCs it's installed on, each of which offers varying quality and security. So Microsoft has a new scheme that rearchitects how Windows PCs boot up to catch malicious firmware manipulations before they give attackers keys to the kingdom.
"A lot of badness happens if your firmware goes wonky. Our internal red team and external folks have really turned their eyes to this," says David Weston, director of operating system security at Microsoft. "Firmware runs at a privileged level. It’s the thing that boots up the machine—it plays a critical role. Yet firmware is not integrated into update systems like Windows Updates, and for enterprises their visibility into firmware is generally relatively limited. So i ..
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