could a bitcoin miner affect a BIOS?

[Waker34]

kinda got me interested if a bitcoin miner could potentially hide inside of the BIOS

 

[Ally]

This is a line of questioning that won't end up anywhere in the realm of ethical mining.

Why would you want to do this? Even if it were possible, it'd probably be inefficient and awful. Not to mention downright unethical. And if not unethical (i.e. not for unethical purposes), it's just stupid. Why run it w/ the BIOS instead of in the OS?

In theory the answer could be yes. In practice, if the BIOS is on its own chip, the answer is probably almost certainly not. You'd have to find a way to physically load it on to the chip, keeping the BIOS in tact, then keep the miner running along the operating system.

 

[Waker34]

Warning: Please read this in its entirety. I cannot possibly create a single post explaining the technical details behind this sort of infection, and while this is likely not what's going on, I feel this is an interesting topic none the less and shedding some light onto this is actually extremely valuable for everyone here

I don't know what you mean exactly by this, but we'll go with the approach that you feel that your BIOS has been infected, and somehow this means (or leads you to believe) that there is a bitcoin miner or something of the sort on the BIOS.

To answer your question, in theory, yes. This is most certainly possible. You could overwrite a BIOS with arbitrary code. This does include a miner, but I don't see how a miner could work like this without something to interface with, such as an operating system with drivers installed.

This doesn't mean it's practical or even worth doing though. I don't think that it would be possible to have a bitcoin miner itself a part of the BIOS. However, having a deep-level piece of malware doing the mining and mimicking a rootkit-like sort of infection is most definitely possible. Nothing is stopping the payload being a miner. As a result, this isn't an unreasonable possibility, but is most definitely an interesting topic to talk about.

On older computers, yeah. Pretty easy. New computers, not so much. Most newer computers within the last 5 or so years have UEFI BIOSes, and these typically only allow signed software to be flashed. This doesn't stop private exploits though, it's been known to happen. Most of these sort of exploits or rootkits typically present themselves as ransomware and demand payment for your computer to be unlocked. At this point, the computer is rendered bricked. I wouldn't recommend the user to attempt to reflash the BIOS as they normally would. I would recommend purchasing a new motherboard. If the data on the disk is important, I recommend taking it to a specialized data recovery professional to attempt to rescue the data. This might not be possible as the entire disk could be encrypted, but this is beyond the realm of what your question is.

The point, yeah, possible, but highly unlikely - and quite frankly someone who possesses this level of knowledge wouldn't bother with bitcoin or any sort of miner - it would be way too noticeable after awhile.​

Thanks for your reply, i'm not into making malware I was drinking and the thought just sparked up in my head, an interface wouldn't be needed if it was using hard code, but malware is scary when you think about it infecting the BIOS, especially if it has the traits of a worm. Theoretically the malware could also survive the BIOS reformat.

 

[mafia]

kinda got me interested if a bitcoin miner could potentially hide inside of the BIOS

I’ve seen quote on quote silent miners, search it up. It’s a malware and unethical, I’d suggest you to not get into it.