The article is long and a bit rambling. It doesn't do a good job of explaining what steps Dragos took to eliminate different attack methods. It doesn't sound like a particularly clean fault finding / debugging session.
> For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa.
I don't want to sound mean, but what? This paragraph just reads like Hurp-Durp to me. I'm an idiot, but even I know that there are some very nasty things to do to USB drives.
> For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa.
I don't want to sound mean, but what? This paragraph just reads like Hurp-Durp to me. I'm an idiot, but even I know that there are some very nasty things to do to USB drives.
EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6534617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1855936