Two high school students in the southwestern city of Gwangju are under investigation after being caught hacking into their teachers’ notebook computers to steal exam papers, police and municipal …
Three serious security vulnerabilities has been discovered, and patched, across a whole slew of Lenovo laptops.
Cybersecurity experts from ESET uncovered the issue in the ReadyBootDxe driver used by some Lenovo notebooks, as well as two buffer overflow issues found in the SystemLoadDefaultDxe driver, potentially allowing threat actors to hijack the startup routine of Windows installations.
The Yoga, IdeaPad, Flex, ThinkBook, V14, V15, V130, Slim, S145, S540, and S940 Lenovo lines are all affected, counting more than 70 endpoint (opens in new tab) models.
“These vulnerabilities were caused by insufficient validation of DataSize parameter passed to the UEFI Runtime Services function GetVariable,” ESET Research tweeted out, recently.
“An attacker could create a specially crafted NVRAM variable, causing buffer overflow of the Data buffer in the second GetVariable call.”
The company has also submitted improved code to Binarly’s UEFI firmware analyzer ‘efiXplorer,’ the publication further found, which all interested admins can find on GitHub, for free.
The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2022-1890, CVE-2022-1891, and CVE-2022-1892, reside in UEFI firmware, and as such, are quite dangerous. Exploiting them allows threat actors to run malware during boot, effectively circumventing any antivirus programs. It also makes malware more persistent, as wiping the disk, which is considered the Hail Mary of virus elimination, doesn’t help.
The silver lining is that not everyone can exploit these flaws – it does require a bit of knowledge. Still, more experienced crooks can wreak major damage.
To make sure their devices are safe, admins are advised to always keep them up to date, both on the software and on the hardware side of things, as well as to keep any software used, updated. Furthermore, having a strong firewall (opens in new tab) solution helps, as well as antivirus.
Users that don’t know exactly which Lenovo model they’re using can use the company’s automatic online detector here (opens in new tab).
I wrote most of this column on a $379 laptop. It’s good for surfing the web and composing Google docs—as long as there aren’t too many tabs open.
Lenovo’s IdeaPad Flex 3 is inexpensive because it’s a Chromebook, a minimalist laptop best at running web apps in Google’s Chrome browser. Like Lenovo, all the other big PC makers have them in their lineups. Do you use cloud-based services for work or school? Live in Google’s ecosystem? At the risk of me sounding like Geico, you could save money by switching to Chrome OS for your next computer.