Lenovo - WTF?


Perhaps after Pyra the next product here should a regular laptop.

I may be interested in a laptop designed for and shipped with a Linux distro.

A quick googling says there are some companies selling Linux laptops already.

Anyone familiar with them, are they worth buying?
 
I bought a netbook, back when you used to be able to buy one without the windows tax. It runs a little warm for what I'm used to, but there have been a lot of improvements since then on that front I gather.


Next portable other than a Pyra might be a chromebook, if they can make an ARM one with more storage space and RAM than my upgraded netbook (68MB and 2GB respectively), because I'm going to rip out that chrome crap and use it as a proper computer.
 
WizardStan said:
some esoteric language that used one letter for everything. 52 named variables, 52 named functions
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After learning about what you can do with Perl6, it could be done in Perl6...

There is even a perl module that does Ook!
 
Yeah, and they wonder why people aren't buying Lenovos anymore...
 
So I guess "Lenovo Thinkpad" isn't anymore what "IBM Thinkpad" was once? Well, one Competitor less to care when I ever decide to buy an Laptop. ^^
 
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I especially liked the Microsoft's new "silently run an exe directly from BIOS without asking" feature.

Now the first thing any self-respecting malware will do is to flash itself into the BIOS so that clean wipe and reinstall will not get rid of it.
 
Well, you can test any device you own by installing a known clean win8 image over to your laptop, then booting it up and comparing it against the original image. AIUI the MS feature works by copying binaries out of the bios when it boots up, so any changes should show up in a diff.

OTOH, I guess not many people are going to want to reimage their machines just to find out, and a lot of the people who really care about this sort of thing are going to have replaced Windows with an alternative OS anyway, which isn't affected by this MS 'feature'.  Also, getting a clean win8 image is left as an exercise for the reader, though it may be safe to assume that a machine from a different manufacturer will install different crapware, so is at least detectable still.

Edit: Also, this mechanism still has a theoretically valid use, to install specific drivers for the specific hardware in use.  Not all change is a threat, although I guess now any change ought to be noted and checked for security holes.
 
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Notaz thats probably already the case with the NSA collaboration with all tech companies. BIOS are for most part black boxes.

Levi, its perfectly possible the BIOS has mechanisms for other OS as well. There is mothing protecting Linus against a BIOS attack like that.
 
The BIOS can do anything it likes, but the mechanism of this attack is that a Microsoft executable that's run at boot time copies binaries out of the BIOS.  If you're not running that executable, nothing extra gets loaded from the BIOS.

Also, on Linux, package managers can protect against this sort of modification; on arch at least I can run 'pacman -Qkk' will query the package database and check that nothing's been modified or deleted.  I hope it checks the package signatures when it does this, although the documentation doesn't seem to confirm that in my quick check of it.
 
Levi said:
The BIOS can do anything it likes, but the mechanism of this attack is that a Microsoft executable that's run at boot time copies binaries out of the BIOS.  If you're not running that executable, nothing extra gets loaded from the BIOS.
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But it's not you who is running that exe, it's Windows doing it silently behind your back. Or are you suggesting to hack the OS so that it doesn't run that stuff?

Levi said:
Also, on Linux, package managers can protect against this sort of modification; on arch at least I can run 'pacman -Qkk' will query the package database and check that nothing's been modified or deleted.  I hope it checks the package signatures when it does this, although the documentation doesn't seem to confirm that in my quick check of it.
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In a targeted attack, it could patch package managers to make them always happy. There are of course ways to detect things like that, but with so many attack vectors (and that number is always growing) there is no way to be 100% safe.

Fusion_Power said:
I still have no experience with UEFI, my PC is to old. So is UEFI actualy good or bad compared to the classical Bios?
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It's like an OS of it's own, it can run UEFI executables, connect to the Internet and so on, although for most users it's just fancy looking BIOS menus.
 
notaz said:
Levi said:
The BIOS can do anything it likes, but the mechanism of this attack is that a Microsoft executable that's run at boot time copies binaries out of the BIOS.  If you're not running that executable, nothing extra gets loaded from the BIOS.
Click to expand...
But it's not you who is running that exe, it's Windows doing it silently behind your back. Or are you suggesting to hack the OS so that it doesn't run that stuff?
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I was explaining to Eki how Linux users (just as Win7 users) aren't subject to this problem. While the BIOS can do anything to compromise your OS in a targeted attack, this particular MS/Lenovo screw up doesn't affect Linux users, and isn't easily detectable (unless you can read the BIOS and know the layout of the binaries Windows uses within it).

It may be relevant to note that Lenovo have released a patch for this.  I suspect it's actually an updated BIOS that simply omits the binaries, rather than a patch/hack of Windows's boot functionality.
 
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Levi i was not talking about this particular issue but the fact that Linux distros can be subject to BIOS attacks as well and if they are properly designed uou would not know about it at all. The NSA is exploiting all these vulnerabilities and thinking your Linux distro is safe is a big leap of faith.
 
Ah, fair enough.  I thought that was a given though, since the BIOS is responsible for loading the bootloader, and can infect that to in turn infect your kernel.  That's been true since the mass production of computers, at least.

That's a targeted attack though, and got nothing to do with this Lenovo screwup (to the best of my knowledge, and Hanlon's razor).  The Lenovo screwup was a buffer overflow (I think) in some code they patched into Windows at boot.  It then takes someone else to use that buffer overflow to get into that driver, and in turn infect the rest of the OS as a privileged user.

You could argue that the way a BIOS loads a bootloader is a door into an attack just like that buffer overflow is, but there's no evidence of manufacturers coding a BIOS to do that yet.  We don't have evidence of Lenovo acting to let the security services into our computers, we have evidence of Lenovo being at least incompetent and not bounds checking their inputs - a relatively common programming error in a language like C.  It's far more likely that hole would be exploited by criminals looking to build a botnet - I don't see why the security services need that level of access for their data collection purposes, but perhaps I'm being naive there.

But a BIOS based attack that uses code that runs in the BIOS is a different attack to one that could be exploited on Lenovo hardware, that uses code that runs in an OS.  You'll have to excuse me for not appreciating you were talking about one when we were talking about the other.
 
Microsoft just implemented a new feature in Windows 10, it is PC-exclusive! (I think)


Want to know what it is? Here is a clue,


Cortana is cheating on you... Even if you disable it...
 
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