SJVN at ZDNet has all the ins and outs on what you can do (other than never reboot your computer) to protect yourself from LogoFAIL until a real fix comes along.
You know that splash-screen logo that you see on your monitor for a few seconds every time you boot your computer? Well, it’s not your friend — or at least the parser that your computer’s UEFI uses to display it isn’t your friend — or maybe it’s your friend and maybe it’s not, depending on what kinda computer your using.
It seems there’s a bug out there that’s totally OS, and even silicon, agnostic — meaning it’s completely an equal opportunity destroyer no matter whether you’re running Linux or Windows, or whether your machine is built with Intel, AMD, Arm, or RISC-V inside. It’ll get you, and it’ll get you good — by taking advantage of an exploit that opens once during the boot process.
It’s being called LogoFAIL, and evidently it’s been there for years — probably for as long as UEFI’s been around — and is great for cracker/hackers because it happens just at the time when your computer is completely unprotected. If you’re running a vulnerable box, and not all computers are vulnerable, there are some temporary fixes that should keep you going until better help comes along — with the better help being in the form of firmware fixes that largely aren’t yet available.
Over at ZDNet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nicols has written an article that explains which computers are probably vulnerable to LogoFAIL, and which ones probably aren’t. He also walks you through the precautions you can take to keep yourself as protected as possible until a real fix comes by that’s taylored for your computer.
Your can read it here: This is how to protect your computers from LogoFAIL attacks
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
