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I think I can debunk this once and for all: If the OP said the CD drive stopped working on his MacBook Air, then it's a hoax. It's impossible for a MacBook Air's CD drive to stop working. That's because they never had one. MacBook Airs never had a CD or DVD drive of any kind. It was one of the things mentioned in the keynote where Steve Jobs first announced the computer. So, if that's the first "symptom" of BadBIOS that Dragos Ruiu noticed, then I think it's safe to say the whole thing is made up.
Nevertheless, there was (and maybe still is) an official Apple USB SuperDrive to accomplish OS X installation, even 2010 MacBook Airs came with OS X 10.6 restore DVDs, but you did still need to buy SuperDrive separately to use those disks
@@w32u64 it's still a thing, but for one, USB SuperDrive doesn't work with anything other than Mac OS X I think. Also, early MacBook Airs came with a USB flash drive to restore the OS (with DVDs as well)
Malware like this is a good spooky story, but it's entirely infeasible as far as I can figure out. You'd need a zero-day in basically every single sound card driver ever.
That is so true I mean how can it infect via sound I get it can send data and download it and run code but to get the code you would already need a payload on the device waiting to hear the sound and download it so it would need wifi to get the payload on the devices so it is clear if it was real that person did a stupid job a isolating the devices from wifi
I work in IT/security (in software, hardware repair, & programming) Some years a go I did work for a client where a virus spread to 12 of his computers- it was NOT this virus though, if it ever existed. However there was a similarity- wiping the drives did just let it re-install. Started checking to see if it was creating a hidden partition on the HD & reinstalling from there, or staying in memory in an expansion card (there were some similar to this that could hide in your dedicated video or sound card & used it's processor & ram as a staging area to re-infect the system after a re-install). After a bit of tracing I found out the virus was actually in the router itself, & had originally gotten access because the routers access info had never been changed after the factory preset. After flashing the routers bios it wasn't an issue anymore, still tracked down where it came from & added lines into the windows hosts file of the server & router to make sure that it'd never be allowed to try to go back to those IP's or any domain/subnet connected to them. Was a tricky lil bugger for sure, but ultimately just needed the right insecticide- me.
I'm sure it has a name, but I don't know what it is. When I encountered it I was trying to fix 12 PC's + the router for a business client that got infected & didn't have the tools with me to do a flash dump of the bios from the router. He'd already lost thousands of dollars in revenue because of the downtime before he got ahold of me. So I didn't waste anytime killing it once I found out where it originated. Might not have been able to anyway- even if I had the tools with me; if it used weird voltages or pinouts, never done one on a router before anyway, so the software might not have worked either as they are usually written for a family of specific chips not just any random one- It would also matter if it was a PROM, EPROM or EEPROM. Some can't read/write certain types as well; sometimes not at all. I also haven't run into that router one again, apparently it was a shiny... Just for reference, even if you did find it or one similar & you let it loose outside of a virtual machine you can be prosecuted for it; even if it was an accident. The good antivirus companies, are like palworld trainers now- they have algorithms that as soon as they find a new virus, malware, trojan, in the wild it automatically contains, analyzes it & usually has a record of the first place it found it right down to the IP address & city. They also track it's spread & how many devices of what type, Servers, PC, android, linux, Mac, IOS etc that it infects & start working on an antivirus patch immediately. That's not including the other cyber security companies or ppl like me who report & upload stuff we come across. Then there's local police cyber crime units & government sanctioned ones too. (Also, Norton antivirus & McCafee are the bottom 2 worst on the list)@@NicksLocker
It is a fun creepypasta, nothing more. It would require an entire protocol to transfer the virus using speakers and microphone, with error correction and so on. It basically implies that you can control the operating system with microphone (saving executable file and then running it), you would need another protocol for that. Then you have problem of overwriting BIOS from the level of operating system, which I don't think is even possible. Back in the day you would have to run BIOS Setup before OS had even started to update it from the floppy.
Not only is overwriting the BIOS possible from the OS, even the CPU microcode can be overwritten. How? It's called the IME or Intel Management Engine. Yes, Intel's AMT allows for a Ring -3 (negative three) rootkit, but it's turned off by default... Supposedly. We don't really know because the code is secret.
I mean, Windows PCs have a table in their ACPI allowing one to embed binaries to be dropped and run during Windows boot. (WBPT) But in this case, I mean, Apple has used OpenFirmware or EFI for years, so secure boot and/or their inbuilt boot chain protection would've been a factor for a long while.
@@Mavendow The shorthand is just ME, and good luck flashing anything onto it without the Hoffman tables for that particular unit. That's not a thing you're likely to be able to even pull off on your own system, let alone anyone else's. Unless of course the decryption tables were leaked out of Intel and I'm unaware of it?
People forget that early Internet connections, especially early dial up (14.4k in particular) - the data connection was made entirely by sound. So you were receiving data via sound. The v.92 dial up modems were the first I saw that used a digitized connection after the initial dial in an handshake, which was still done by sound. (The noise of robots killing each other.)
"Communicating information with sound is not at all unheard of. We've been doing it for hundreds of years." Yeah, I think we've been doing that for a bit longer, lol.
Anyone who works with electronics knows that coils in circuits can generate high frequency sounds, since the coil vibrates when working at high frequencies, and sometimes it is audible. Excellent story, it's for a black mirror episode haha 😂
"A lot less options to choose from computer-wise in the 80s"? Citation needed! In the here and now there are essentially two basic CPU platforms - x86 and ARM - and while there may be a gazillion motherboard manufacturers the underlying architectures are fairly homogenised (particularly in the x86 world). In the 80s, however, we had a myriad of CPUs - 8088, x86, Z80, 6502, 680x0, TMS9900, etc. - and even computers that shared a CPU would often have wildly different architectures. In the UK in the 1980s we had the ZX Spectrum, BBC/Acorn, Oric, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Dragon, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Amiga, PC, VIC-20/C64/C128, Mac, and probably a bunch more I've forgotten. The 80s were a wild time!
Not even the Wild West, it was full out caveman warfare for the computer verse. I watch videos on all the old PCs and it gives me a headache how many different, same part using, yet not at all compatible computers there were.
True, back then pretty much every company built their own stuff. Nowadays we have people just going with either one of the two big players and there's no one else to choose from.
UEFI and BIOS are still effectively the same. One of which are just easier to use. BIOS itself is a pain but very simple to use and implement. UEFI can be worse, UEFI implementations depend to have firmware bugs, super annoying shit when doing osdev But uefi has a lot of benifits like built-in boot-loader drivers and secure boot. and generally is indeed easier to use as it is a plain C api, every Win32 developer should be familiar with.
a BIOS is the basic input output system and will always run in 16bit (where as UEFI can run under 32 or 64). - I find legacy bugs we used to run into far worse than any UEFI counterparts. But part of me does miss calling INT 13 for a quick reboot.
Even if it’s not possible as written, I gotta give kudos to the “Bones” writer(s) who came up with the idea of malware carved into a skeleton; very creative and forward-thinking, especially if it’s theoretically possible for it to have done something under the right circumstances.
@@UltimatePerfection You can reprogram a battery charging controller to set e.g. the cell voltage limit instead of 4.2V to e.g. 4.8V, so during the next charge it will go kaboom with a fireball. (Such tests were verified on ole Mac laptops.) In more sophisticated charge balancer chips it may be even possible to transfer charge from one cell to another to intentionally overcharge one of them to set it on fire without need of a mains connection to a charger. (An intelligent malware may wait until the device is left unattended tonight on a flammable sofa or such to also burn the house down.)
That bone scanning malware isn't as ridiculous when you learn that HP's excuse for their printers requiring 1st-party ink cartridges is that it's possible for 3rd-arty ink cartridges to contain malware. Although, I guess the big difference here is that HP intentionally created a problem so that they could be the solution to said problem.
This is clearly a hoax. The main reason being, as you identified, that any target computer would already need to be compromised in order for the microphone to be enabled and software would need to be running on the OS to interpret the sounds as code. Audio hardware will not operate unless the OS has the correct driver running. That this guy had it isolated in a lab, yet hasn't produced any evidence in over 10 years seals the deal.
The sound receiving backdoor is likely default part of the firmware requested by national agencies. In USA mobile phones are legally requested to contain a similar spy mode "roving bug" in its Baseband OS as official part of their mobile radio standard (i.e. sale of phones without would be illegal in USA).
@@Senjamin there used to be a problem with certain frequencies in music that blue screened old laptops with mechanical hard drives, like if you were playing the music next to the laptop it would just crash
The fact the subreddit dedicated to it is also mostly just about "electromagnetic targetting", mass surveillance, mind control, sound weapons, etc. etc. as well as being abandoned, there's not a lot of credence to the people outside of the original guy who claim to have also encountered the virus.
7:05 Even then, a virus that was programmed to exactly, but **loosely** do that was CIH, and all it ever did was trash the BIOS of specific motherboards back in the 90s. EDIT: It's a very good hypothetical 'computer virus', makes for a great Black Mirror episode. The only thing that really comes close is viruses that are able to backdoor and infect routers and the firmware itself. Though, with TPM and memory integrity being pushed a lot more these days, it's becoming more and more of a hypothetical. From what I know, and someone can correct me on this, but WIndows booting into BIOS mode from the desktop can be done on specific devices still, and so can putting a device into flashmode using an application, but even that would require physical input to continue with the installation from the user, along with a very specific BIOS file meant for the motherboard, would it not?
Great video. But the QR code example doesn't really work because standard it's built on has a lot of redundancy and error correction. That's the reason qr codes can have little images in the middle, the error correction fills in the missing data.
About that Bones episode you're talking about: the reason Angela's computer went up in flames (according to the logic of the show, not necessarily real life) is because the virus not only disabled the computer's cooling system, but also disabled any fail-safes against the inital disabling, which caused her computer to overheat. Like you, NationSquid, I dunno if that would actually cause it to go up in flames or not, but I just wanted to add some context to that scene. Anyway, I like that you covered what is essentially an urban legend, while explaining some of the logistics of it, instead of just calling it a hoax and calling it a day. I definitely learned a few things from this video.
You can reprogram a battery charging controller to set e.g. the cell voltage limit instead of 4.2V to e.g. 4.8V, so during the next charge it will go kaboom with a fireball. (Such tests were verified on old Mac laptops.) In more sophisticated charge balancer chips it may be even possible to transfer charge from one cell to another to intentionally overcharge one of them to set it on fire without need of a mains connection to a charger. While the Bones story is too madeup (binary code printed on a scanned skeleton), setting a battery ablaze by software manipulation is in no way impossible.
While still farfetched, this Bones storyline is at least more believable than that NCIS episode in which two people were typing on the same keyboard at the same time to stop a hacker.
There are BIOS or UEFI viruses. There are even UEFI or BIOS scanners, like ESET has a UEFI scanner in it's EIS suitue. The "spread through the air" "don't care about airgap" is not very realistic.
@@thatoneglitchpokemon really? without having to disable secure boot or anything other security features? If that's true, it makes the whole UEFI thing seem like a pain in the ass & waste of time . Just run a Linux BIOS with emulator
@@petevenuti7355well, you are right, without secure boot, it's kinda impossible. still saying that, some legitamite services require secure boot to be turned off, and that can lead to some viruses leaking into uefi
I remember when one time Mutahar from SomeOrdinaryGamers said that when EAS is used in Japan some special signal is broadcasted that turns devices (like TV's) on to show the emergency broadcast (and then they start to emit that sound to activate more devices). No idea if it would work on PC's as well tho
I'm going to assume that Japanese televisions are specifically programmed to detect that sound and display the broadcast when they hear it. You couldn't just play that sound to any TV and have it react that way.
It dont need to be a bios virus. It could have imbedded itself in the factory image of the backup so that it couldnt be removed by a reset. Got 4 bugs myself that does this.
Some consumer grade Lenovo laptop types came with Chinese adware infested bios, that automatically reinstalled adware/spaware into the Windows partition when installing Windows.
Sending data thru sound without errors is technically possible. We can use two different frequencies to represent high bit (1) and low bit (0) then add error correction such as hamming code. However, implementing this on BIOS is almost impossible because hacker need to squeeze the required hardware drivers into teeny tiny BIOS storage.
The claim that acoustic background noise would make it fail is nonsense. Check how noisy e.g. the GPS satellite signal is, but they use plenty of CRC to reconstruct valid data. It only makes a modem connection slower.
The way you explain stuff for us is so good. Like using the example of covering up a part of a picture of urself vs a QR code and the example of speaking French to a person who speaks English and the examples like that are SO helpful for me to understand. I subscribed because you take complex topics that I want to understand and make them something that I can understand and I love it
There is one possibility you didn't cover, and that is that the hardware shipped infected from the factory. Most computers are made in China (even MacBooks), and a lot of them are made from OEM manufacturers like Foxconn (even MacBooks). There has already been documented cases of chinese made american electronics "calling home" to chinese servers. If companies like Foxconn is instructed to ship computers and phones they make with infected firmware, they sure can. And then they can lay dormant until some weird code is transmitted via sound. Maybe even embedded into a hit song for all that I know. I believe this to be the most likely scenario, although this story itself seems very unlikely. All of it is theoretically possible, but to actually carry this out in the real world would be expensive and really difficult. Unless you're the corrupt government of one of the largest economies in the world.
But in that scenario why should the virus make itself noticable? When your just stealing data its best stay hidden and never getting noticed. Still in theory one of the best explanaitions.
You can use Music to listen to the music on your CDs. In the Music app on your Mac, insert an audio CD into your computer's CD or DVD drive, or into an external drive that's connected to your computer. Apple said that idk
I presume this is the same kinda thing when you call a mobile but it's still ringing but breaks for a slight second where you can hear the other person's phone but hasn't picked up yet. And continues ringing
What if he was trying to get people thinking about the security of other parts of computer hardware and software? Sure, in this specific representation, the likelihood of a virus acting that way is slim... but it makes you wonder what else is actually possible.
That QR Code probably would have scanned just fine. QR Codes typically include error correction. The image you transmitted could have been formatted with error correction as well.
Not the first virus to spread through the air. Older cellphones were retransmitting a virus that was only known to drain the battery faster because it turned up the antenna gain way before this instance. I was previously laughed at by an IT technician after I told them that I had seen a virus hit my PC's BIOS. Anything that is programmable can be volatile. Your "UEFI" works at a High Level. Most viruses that affect the BIOS are at a Low-Level which some are programmed to inject code into the host OS. They can even reach internet channels if they are programmed to do so. Low Level programming is well ahead of any of the brains of any educated programmer of today because they were never taught to utilize it. Most programs run on 3-5 tiers of High-Level programming and will be infected if any lower tiers are affected in some way. Ok, I'm rambling... For your "Air Virus". It is known that some CPU's have an address volatility problem where if an instruction was sent to an address it would execute it. The sound of a computer is controlled by a DAC and that DAC communicates on a CPU BUS. If a certain set of instructions were to leak past where the CPU would mistakenly run the code it would become infected. The code would not have to be majorly complex. Just the code would have to act if it was part of the CPU bus to be executed. It would literally bypass the OS, UEFI and BIOS directly hitting the CPU. The code itself can be smaller than this following string of text... "Open sound device. Transmit code. Save code." It could be more complex but not much needed to be of any great size. We are talking about bits and bytes here working at the lowest level where you only can see the highest level unless you have the tools to read each instruction as it happens which does need specialty equipment
Early AMD K6-series CPUs had a bug that could crash them by reading certain bit patterns (even within e.g. a jpeg picture) and so caused mysterious lockups. I don't know if this could actually execute code, but if the bits came decoded from audio-in (I very much doubt that it is possible without CRC error correction) it hypothetically might be possible to be fooled to execute arbitrary code only played as sound into a microphone.
Exactly. The sound receiving backdoor is likely default part of the firmware requested by national agencies. Mobile phones are legally requested to contain a similar spy mode "roving bug" in its Baseband OS as official part of US mobile radio standard (i.e. sale of phones without would be illegal in USA). UEFI and BIOS are made by few companies and differ only in their config, thus the same sound modem code can easily run on many different hardwares.
The presentation of this video gives me some good old tabloid vibes. Had a good laugh, haha)) That said, this virus is somewhat plausible. At least in theory. BIOS have access to wifi and bluetooth hardware, so once it has taken control of that it can potentially spread itself through those networks onto other computers. At the same time though, the level of sofistication of a malware like this is unimaginable. Storing something so powerful on a very limited resources of a BIOS ROM doesn't seem possible for something so underpowered as macbook air. This one seems to be fake, but with some tweaks it might be a good script for a halloween horror story aimed at IT audience!
alongside all the other points people are making here i'd add that most microphones of the era had a quality so terrible they likely couldn't pick up these supposed frequencies anyway. plus, many many devices did not have microphones at all. plus plus, there were many different soundcard drivers. there are so many reasons (other than these few that i immediately thought of) that would make this truly impossible
I had a bad case of computer virus infecting my PC back in 2010. It would disable the task manager on Windows XP and could not be deleted through a format and reinstalling of the OS. Don't know if it infected the BIOS or not but a computer repair shop was able to cleanse whatever was infected and put the PC in working order.
Most phones _are_ constantly listening for "OK Google" or "Siri". This could serve as an attack vector if you "spoke" a malformed sentence or something.
One thing worth noting is that error correcting code (ecc) exists. It's a means of putting redundant bits in data in case parts of the transmission are lost. One place you'll commonly see this is in methods of optically encoding data such as qr codes, bar codes and cds.
CRC is the most basic part of every modem standard, so transmitting a picture the analogue way like in this example is misleading or even needs to be rated disinformation.
It's very unlikely that this does exist, but if it does, then it will probably be discovered that this is some kind of PRISM program-level backdoor discovered by someone who wasn't supposed to find it. You know, all those conspiracy theories about how your microphone can secretly be turned on at the BIOS level in a way software can't detect, so the NSA can listen in? If that turned out to be true, then it's equally possible that such a backdoor would also allow injecting code into the BIOS itself by playing a specific sound, if they do not like what the person is doing with their system and want to put a stop to it. There are some common components of UEFI firmware that are common to all BIOS manufacturers. It's absolutely true that this attack vector wouldn't be possible if nothing were programmed for a protocol that could translate sound into data. It also shouldn't be possible if microphones are correctly turned off at the hardware level and not listening when not in use by software. But if they are always on at the BIOS level and listening on some hidden protocol, well... then the attack is possible and ultimately a government somewhere is responsible for making it possible on purpose, and they should be held accountable if this is real. I don't believe an attack like that is possible unless someone out there intentionally inserted a backdoor into most computer's UEFI firmware to make it possible, on purpose. Possibly if it wasn't our government, then Russia or China leaned on the UEFI manufacturers and got this put in. It would be that level of interference.
Also mobile phones are legally requested to contain a similar spy mode "roving bug" in its Baseband OS as official part of US mobile radio standard (i.e. sale of phones without would be illegal in USA). That PCs need to contain such backdoors for use by national bureaus is absolutely plausible.
HAM radio operators have their own thing of sound-to-data, called SSTV. They send a ~30 second beepidy-boop through the shortwave band and the receiver, who can be thousands of miles away unter certain circumstances, can restore a low resolution still image from that. Basically you can send memes around the globe without internet. Sometimes even the ISS sends SSTV images, but you gotta plan the reception, because you can only get the signal if the station is visible at "your" sky. But it gets even crazier, a lesser known standard called NBTV whis is even lower resolution, but the image can move like a GIF.
0:47 Could this be part of the origin of Kamen Rider Ex-aid's bugster virus? 10:38 I think in one of the8bitguy's videos he got the c64 floppy disc drive to "read" a program just by playing a sound file near the drive?
Something i don't understand about this is that the sound wave theory only works if the receiving device has a way to execute code through sound input AND needs to be actively listening and, as far as I'm aware, even when it is listening like in cases of voice assistants, it still can't execute code from it
Thought I'd chime in here that you can put BIOS-embedded viruses into ANYTHING that has a flashable BIOS chip in it! Graphics cards, Network cards, Mainboard BIOSes, USB and Sound Driver BIOSes and a whole lot more! In the old days we embedded viruses into the Adlib and Soundblaster audio card bioses which recorded keystrokes all day long into non-volatile RAM or hiddens ectors in local free HARD DRIVE space and then exfiltrated the recorded keystrokes into compressed data files that were then played back as above-human-hearing ultrasound beeps and boops coming from the inside-computer-case speaker which were interpreted by "spies" or packages left outside offices or via cleaning personnel that recorded the beeps and boops for later interpretation. Even if a machine was turned OFF, the adlib or soundblaster card could STILL beep and boop at ultrasonic frequencies since it was self-powered long-enough to sound the bits and bytes as sound-based data. The on-site counter-intelligence personnel were always looking for RADIO WAVES and not ultrasonic sound waves so these were always overlooked! The sonic range was limited and data exfiltration was SLOOOOOOW but it worked very well! It's how Soviet, Chinese and other target agencies were spied upon in the 1980's and 1990's Nowadays, I can exfiltrate data from a computer by pulsing any onboard LED lights by blinking them based upon amplitude, time, frequency at very high data rates. I can also use the electrical whine of CPU and GPU components to exfiltrate recorded keystroke or on-screen image-captured data by purposefully pulsing or writing to certain parts of the CPU and CPU or your hard disk or SSD drive to create a high frquency or low-frequency machine-discernable whine or machine-discernable EM field waveform that contains the data I want to grab from you. Most agencies overlook such techniques but we don't! I can even blink and change the refresh rate of your display in order exfiltrate data OR even embed Steganographic data into the on-screen monitor display as it comes out the GPU card or via EM fields that are part of the power-down/power-up circuits or part of any on-display LED light to allow for data exfiltration. Any part of your PC or game console or TV that can click, whine, hum or beem and boop can be used to exfiltrate your captured private data whenever we feel like! I can get YOUR DATA from ANYWHERE at ANYTIME !!!! V
That kind of stuff is pretty well documented, (though some of your details are off) but it still requires some way to infect the target system to load the spyware in the first place.
@@BrainStormzFTC I have the details down quite pat since I KNOW the methods directly involved! The Adlib cards were BIOS changed at the Burnaby, BC, Canada fcatory in the 1980's BEFORE they were shipped out and the Soundblaster cards had the changes made just after the Singapore/Malaysia warehouse and/or factories shipped them out. The Soviet tended to buy LOTS of computer gear from West Germany at the time using "secret purchasers" who were actually tracked by various Western 3 and 4 letter agencies and so West Germany was flooded with the cards at specific dealers to ensure that the changed cards would be bought by the Soviet-controlled purchasers OR that a specific target purchaser person was shipped the changed cards. The Soviets weren't dumb so they CHECKED OUT the computer systems quite intensely BUT various HIDDEN changes ensured that the checks they did do would MATCH the expected checksum output values of both the unchanged AND changed cards. Cleaning and maintenance personnel were EXTENSIVELY compromised to unwittingly gather exfiltrated data from keystroke recordings and MS-DOS-screen ASCII-based data captures and higher level graphics workstation-specific bitmap screen captures. Those old computers had MINIMAL MEMORY usually One Megabyte to Four Megabytes (NOT GIGABYTES but MEGABYTES!) of System RAM and maybe 5 to 20 Megabyte disk drives so secret disk sectors had to be hidden and managed very well in order to store the daily recordings made by the changed BIOS software so the IT personnel wouldn't notice the changes or recordings. Compression was a VERY BIG DEAL in those days and the NSA (National Security Agency) in the USA spent MILLIONS of USD on PhD-level Math experts doing nothing but designing and coding advanced compression and encryption algorithms still used and KEPT SECRET EVEN TODAY! Using an Intelligence Agency Example, those data exfiltration techniques in around the mid-1980's were but ONE WAY western agencies figured out just how far ahead the Soviets were in DESIGNING and TESTING Explosive Lensing techniques used in Large-Yield Nuclear and High-Explosive Conventional weapons system development where they designed and welded thick steel panels to make 8 foot thick (2.5 metres thick!) hollow spheres out of solid steel so they can record and figure out HOW explosions actually detonated, propogated and reflected INSIDE those thick spheres. The data recorded in real-time at the physics-based level, let the Soviets become able to model NEW explosive designs to make SMALLER AND MORE POWERFUL weapons systems than the west could make! Just that development put them 15 to 20 years ahead of the west! That is just ONE example of what was found out! V
@@nickwallette6201 There were small memory spaces AND added non-volatile RAM-space where data could be processed hidden on the changed cards. The 8-bit microcontrollers were good enough to do quite an amount of processing. The Apollo SPACE program that landed people on the Moon has MUCH LESS CPU horsepower than the Adlib and Soundblaster audio cards of those days in the 1980's and 1990's! Network cards, GPU cards and RAM expansion cards were ALSO extensively modded to be shipped over to West Germany to ensure the Soviets would get modded gear that could be spied upon by western agencies! You should have seen DefSec Caspar Weinberger's face in the mid-1980-'s face on the day he found out the Soviet Gas and Oil Pipelines got blown up REAL GOOD by INTENTIONALLY MODDED micro-controllers and controller software that the Soviets stole and/or bought from the West! It was the Stuxnet of the 1980's using POSITIVELY ANCIENT computer CPU horsepower! My smartwatch has more CPU horsepower than ALL of those systems combined! The Western Intelligence did quite a lot with the very limited processing power they had! Nowadays, I have a Terabyte of System RAM worth of at-my-office Super-Workstation that has over a PETAFLOP worth of GPU horsepower attached to it! What they could have done with that sort of CPU/GPU horsepower in those days would be mind-boggling! And the parent company paid less than $250,000 CDN for it all just a couple of years ago! The average STUDENT today has more CPU/GPU horsepower in their smartphone and laptop than the ENTIRE NSA had in 1985! V
Most speakers and microphones are engineered to work between 2Khz - 20Khz. To actually transmit with sound, and not be heard by humans, you'd need something higher than 25Khz, and good luck finding equipment that can do that unless you're willing to spend stupid amounts of money.
Even Alexa smart speakers can be fooled to listen to human unhearable ultrasound frequencies >100 kHz. Most modern soundcards internally sample at much higher frequencies than CD quality and hence prebugged firmware can use it.
The definition at the beginning is for a worm, not a virus but the term “virus” is often used interchangeably with “malware”. A virus inserts itself into an existing program or file.
You forgot hardware instruction sets , hardware abstraction layers which are essential for any computer , then error checking and correcting etc which are all hardware based as well as software , you can implement AES-NI instruction in software if your hardware supports it , just like the TPM thing now. Then , there are metadata that OS uses to identify stuff , not much nowadays , but in past it was very important. In early days of computing , and even 10 years from that story , you had issues if your program was x86 based that it wont run on AMD , and so on , list is long , but you can perfectly do it on platforms like Raspberry Pi , Arduino and similar , as hardware and firmware isn't so smart , it interprets machine level code as it's thrown at it , without asking many questions. You can dig deeper in JFIF and EXIF exploits as they are very basic example on how computers interpret things. DOS prompt wont prevent you from killing entire OS if you told it do so , nor will any other interpreter as long as it understands what it receives.
I worked in the government as an it tech. We had a virus that made the computer “sing”. We had to flash the bios and low level format the drive. So it did exist. And I hated that. We lost a lot of data because users refused to save to network. 😂 Luckily, he was in a very well shielded office using…Windows ME. Yeah. I know. 😂
at 16:56 your covering the most important part of the qr code, see. qr codes do indeed have error correction, but the part you covered contains very important info about the qr code (length, tracker and encoding)
Cover your asses, developers. Log every damn thing related to auth you can find and make sure the logs are stuffed in a vault somewhere. If this happens on systems running your software, you don't wanna catch that blame hammer.
16:55 Technically QR codes are built with so much redundancy and error correction that you could cover a LOT of the QR code before it actually becomes impossible to recover the data from it.
Some computers also have IR sensors that are used for communicating. Given the chance I turn off everything like that. I still expect to see malware spread via RFD.
MacBook Airs don't have optical drives. Never did. Even when Macs still had optical drives. That right there would be enough to discredit him in my eyes. lol
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Hi
Hi @nationsquid, I have a question. Is there a service that can delete spam mail automatically or filter maybe?
I think I can debunk this once and for all: If the OP said the CD drive stopped working on his MacBook Air, then it's a hoax. It's impossible for a MacBook Air's CD drive to stop working. That's because they never had one. MacBook Airs never had a CD or DVD drive of any kind. It was one of the things mentioned in the keynote where Steve Jobs first announced the computer. So, if that's the first "symptom" of BadBIOS that Dragos Ruiu noticed, then I think it's safe to say the whole thing is made up.
Nevertheless, there was (and maybe still is) an official Apple USB SuperDrive to accomplish OS X installation, even 2010 MacBook Airs came with OS X 10.6 restore DVDs, but you did still need to buy SuperDrive separately to use those disks
@@w32u64Yes, so they probably meant that.
Your right bro good job
I'm just going to believe this and like it so nationsquid sees it
@@w32u64 it's still a thing, but for one, USB SuperDrive doesn't work with anything other than Mac OS X I think. Also, early MacBook Airs came with a USB flash drive to restore the OS (with DVDs as well)
My favourite part about the nirvana bit at 10:18 is you're not even playing Nirvana, you're playing an obscure Green day track from their first album
...Wait...
-Was that not the joke?
@@RiverboatPirate it is exactly the joke :b
It's "At The Library", for those interested
oh my god that's just beautiful
At the library! Good stuff!
Malware like this is a good spooky story, but it's entirely infeasible as far as I can figure out. You'd need a zero-day in basically every single sound card driver ever.
The posts were composed of near Halloween so probably just a joke but apparently NationSquid doesn't get it
Trust me it's real bro I made it no cap n0 click bait 2025
If you're the government, you theoretically could, "legally" and/or surreptitiously.
That is so true I mean how can it infect via sound I get it can send data and download it and run code but to get the code you would already need a payload on the device waiting to hear the sound and download it so it would need wifi to get the payload on the devices so it is clear if it was real that person did a stupid job a isolating the devices from wifi
you know hes a skid when he says 'zero-day' ahahah
I work in IT/security (in software, hardware repair, & programming) Some years a go I did work for a client where a virus spread to 12 of his computers- it was NOT this virus though, if it ever existed. However there was a similarity- wiping the drives did just let it re-install. Started checking to see if it was creating a hidden partition on the HD & reinstalling from there, or staying in memory in an expansion card (there were some similar to this that could hide in your dedicated video or sound card & used it's processor & ram as a staging area to re-infect the system after a re-install). After a bit of tracing I found out the virus was actually in the router itself, & had originally gotten access because the routers access info had never been changed after the factory preset. After flashing the routers bios it wasn't an issue anymore, still tracked down where it came from & added lines into the windows hosts file of the server & router to make sure that it'd never be allowed to try to go back to those IP's or any domain/subnet connected to them. Was a tricky lil bugger for sure, but ultimately just needed the right insecticide- me.
Wow that is so cool! I was honestly wondering if it had to do with the router. Is there a name for this virus?
Smart of you to suspect the router, good job!
I'm sure it has a name, but I don't know what it is. When I encountered it I was trying to fix 12 PC's + the router for a business client that got infected & didn't have the tools with me to do a flash dump of the bios from the router. He'd already lost thousands of dollars in revenue because of the downtime before he got ahold of me. So I didn't waste anytime killing it once I found out where it originated.
Might not have been able to anyway- even if I had the tools with me; if it used weird voltages or pinouts, never done one on a router before anyway, so the software might not have worked either as they are usually written for a family of specific chips not just any random one- It would also matter if it was a PROM, EPROM or EEPROM. Some can't read/write certain types as well; sometimes not at all. I also haven't run into that router one again, apparently it was a shiny...
Just for reference, even if you did find it or one similar & you let it loose outside of a virtual machine you can be prosecuted for it; even if it was an accident. The good antivirus companies, are like palworld trainers now- they have algorithms that as soon as they find a new virus, malware, trojan, in the wild it automatically contains, analyzes it & usually has a record of the first place it found it right down to the IP address & city. They also track it's spread & how many devices of what type, Servers, PC, android, linux, Mac, IOS etc that it infects & start working on an antivirus patch immediately. That's not including the other cyber security companies or ppl like me who report & upload stuff we come across. Then there's local police cyber crime units & government sanctioned ones too. (Also, Norton antivirus & McCafee are the bottom 2 worst on the list)@@NicksLocker
Thanks, appreciated. Been doing this stuuf for a long time.@@thatoneglitchpokemon
@@elvendragonhammer5433what would your recommendation be for a good antivirus?
"there's a high pitched sound in this room and it's giving computers viruses" is the kind of information that makes someone crazy with paranoia
Just watched a video by David Bombal about RF frequencies and being able to intercept passwords from the sound the ram makes. I'm sure it was Bombal.
New fear unlocked: Science-fiction computer viruses
lol
It's most likely a hoax, I wouldn't worry too much
@@joshuamccutcheon Dude, it's all about the chill right here on he Internet.
It is a fun creepypasta, nothing more. It would require an entire protocol to transfer the virus using speakers and microphone, with error correction and so on. It basically implies that you can control the operating system with microphone (saving executable file and then running it), you would need another protocol for that.
Then you have problem of overwriting BIOS from the level of operating system, which I don't think is even possible. Back in the day you would have to run BIOS Setup before OS had even started to update it from the floppy.
Not only is overwriting the BIOS possible from the OS, even the CPU microcode can be overwritten. How? It's called the IME or Intel Management Engine. Yes, Intel's AMT allows for a Ring -3 (negative three) rootkit, but it's turned off by default... Supposedly. We don't really know because the code is secret.
I mean, Windows PCs have a table in their ACPI allowing one to embed binaries to be dropped and run during Windows boot. (WBPT) But in this case, I mean, Apple has used OpenFirmware or EFI for years, so secure boot and/or their inbuilt boot chain protection would've been a factor for a long while.
@@Mavendow The shorthand is just ME, and good luck flashing anything onto it without the Hoffman tables for that particular unit. That's not a thing you're likely to be able to even pull off on your own system, let alone anyone else's. Unless of course the decryption tables were leaked out of Intel and I'm unaware of it?
Yeah, I don't think an ordinary cybercriminal would be capable of something like that. A dedicated state actor on the other hand?
@@Mavendow AMD does the same backdoor crap named Platform Security Processor.
People forget that early Internet connections, especially early dial up (14.4k in particular) - the data connection was made entirely by sound. So you were receiving data via sound. The v.92 dial up modems were the first I saw that used a digitized connection after the initial dial in an handshake, which was still done by sound. (The noise of robots killing each other.)
"Communicating information with sound is not at all unheard of. We've been doing it for hundreds of years." Yeah, I think we've been doing that for a bit longer, lol.
QR code goes to The Beatles - All My Loving
Missed opportunity to have the QR code be a Rickroll.
@@CyanRooperthat’s what I assumed
"It infects Linux, BSD, Windows". Me using templeos: You have no power here, Gandalf the grey.
Next update: it now works on TempleOS
@@bise_moon Last update: Virus got slapped by god
Lmao, Deus Vult, fellow keyboard warrior of the cross XD
The spookiest part? The MacBook Air NEVER had an optical drive of any kind.
Anyone who works with electronics knows that coils in circuits can generate high frequency sounds, since the coil vibrates when working at high frequencies, and sometimes it is audible. Excellent story, it's for a black mirror episode haha 😂
Tfw you're constantly getting reinfected with that 60Hz line-frequency malware
Modems are literally just microphones and speakers relaying digital information in the form of sound. Congratulations on reinventing the modem.
"A lot less options to choose from computer-wise in the 80s"? Citation needed!
In the here and now there are essentially two basic CPU platforms - x86 and ARM - and while there may be a gazillion motherboard manufacturers the underlying architectures are fairly homogenised (particularly in the x86 world). In the 80s, however, we had a myriad of CPUs - 8088, x86, Z80, 6502, 680x0, TMS9900, etc. - and even computers that shared a CPU would often have wildly different architectures. In the UK in the 1980s we had the ZX Spectrum, BBC/Acorn, Oric, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Dragon, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Amiga, PC, VIC-20/C64/C128, Mac, and probably a bunch more I've forgotten. The 80s were a wild time!
Not even the Wild West, it was full out caveman warfare for the computer verse. I watch videos on all the old PCs and it gives me a headache how many different, same part using, yet not at all compatible computers there were.
Wikipedia moment
he said it can still happen
True, back then pretty much every company built their own stuff. Nowadays we have people just going with either one of the two big players and there's no one else to choose from.
Imagine a bioweapon that changes your eyes so that you become a computer virus on webcam
Bro 🤫
UEFI and BIOS are still effectively the same.
One of which are just easier to use. BIOS itself is a pain but very simple to use and implement. UEFI can be worse, UEFI implementations depend to have firmware bugs, super annoying shit when doing osdev
But uefi has a lot of benifits like built-in boot-loader drivers and secure boot. and generally is indeed easier to use as it is a plain C api, every Win32 developer should be familiar with.
a BIOS is the basic input output system and will always run in 16bit (where as UEFI can run under 32 or 64). - I find legacy bugs we used to run into far worse than any UEFI counterparts. But part of me does miss calling INT 13 for a quick reboot.
Even if it’s not possible as written, I gotta give kudos to the “Bones” writer(s) who came up with the idea of malware carved into a skeleton; very creative and forward-thinking, especially if it’s theoretically possible for it to have done something under the right circumstances.
But not blowing up lmao
@@fusseldiebIf the malware stops system fans and overclock the components to the point of thermal failure, why not?
@@UltimatePerfection You can reprogram a battery charging controller to set e.g. the cell voltage limit instead of 4.2V to e.g. 4.8V, so during the next charge it will go kaboom with a fireball. (Such tests were verified on ole Mac laptops.) In more sophisticated charge balancer chips it may be even possible to transfer charge from one cell to another to intentionally overcharge one of them to set it on fire without need of a mains connection to a charger. (An intelligent malware may wait until the device is left unattended tonight on a flammable sofa or such to also burn the house down.)
That bone scanning malware isn't as ridiculous when you learn that HP's excuse for their printers requiring 1st-party ink cartridges is that it's possible for 3rd-arty ink cartridges to contain malware. Although, I guess the big difference here is that HP intentionally created a problem so that they could be the solution to said problem.
This is clearly a hoax. The main reason being, as you identified, that any target computer would already need to be compromised in order for the microphone to be enabled and software would need to be running on the OS to interpret the sounds as code. Audio hardware will not operate unless the OS has the correct driver running. That this guy had it isolated in a lab, yet hasn't produced any evidence in over 10 years seals the deal.
The sound receiving backdoor is likely default part of the firmware requested by national agencies. In USA mobile phones are legally requested to contain a similar spy mode "roving bug" in its Baseband OS as official part of their mobile radio standard (i.e. sale of phones without would be illegal in USA).
To be honest, a movie about AI turning evil and infecting computers due to a sound sounds like a cool plot. Nice video BTW!
"In 2077 what makes someone a criminal? Spreading computer viruses by playing Despacito in public."
imagining bird box but for androids hearing things
@@Senjamin there used to be a problem with certain frequencies in music that blue screened old laptops with mechanical hard drives, like if you were playing the music next to the laptop it would just crash
@@CyanRooper LOL
the sound sounds good 👌
The fact the subreddit dedicated to it is also mostly just about "electromagnetic targetting", mass surveillance, mind control, sound weapons, etc. etc. as well as being abandoned, there's not a lot of credence to the people outside of the original guy who claim to have also encountered the virus.
Most BIOSes aren't too different from each other. They are often just licensed from Phoenix and the OEMs slap their custom GUI on top of it.
The fact that you've managed to transmit an image by noise just for demonstration is spectacular on its own.
Not to break the vibe, but thats a really easy thing to do and there are lots of tools that will do it for you.
You can draw literally anything on a spectrogram and then converting it to a sound wave. It's really not that complicated.
Transmitting data via audio really isn’t that impressive nowadays
technology is a wonderful thing ,,
@@lord_snigglebottom2 comma crisis oh no 😟
I'm glad the QR-code isn't a Rickroll
That's why I only use OS/2 Warp 4. I can't do anything with it, but I've never got infected with a virus.
7:05 Even then, a virus that was programmed to exactly, but **loosely** do that was CIH, and all it ever did was trash the BIOS of specific motherboards back in the 90s.
EDIT: It's a very good hypothetical 'computer virus', makes for a great Black Mirror episode. The only thing that really comes close is viruses that are able to backdoor and infect routers and the firmware itself. Though, with TPM and memory integrity being pushed a lot more these days, it's becoming more and more of a hypothetical.
From what I know, and someone can correct me on this, but WIndows booting into BIOS mode from the desktop can be done on specific devices still, and so can putting a device into flashmode using an application, but even that would require physical input to continue with the installation from the user, along with a very specific BIOS file meant for the motherboard, would it not?
Qr code was a bad example. Qr code has an insane error correction capacity
"Oh I love Nirvana! They make the best clothes" Really sent me. 😂😅🤣
Great video. But the QR code example doesn't really work because standard it's built on has a lot of redundancy and error correction. That's the reason qr codes can have little images in the middle, the error correction fills in the missing data.
The same way as CD can be scratched, but still read properly
Babe wake up, new nation squid video dropped
Already awake
I’m wide awake honey!!!
This meme died years ago. Stop
In Australia it's 1:24 perfect time for TH-cam
Erm, actually, the channel’s proper name is Nation’s Quid. Please reconsider your comment.
About that Bones episode you're talking about: the reason Angela's computer went up in flames (according to the logic of the show, not necessarily real life) is because the virus not only disabled the computer's cooling system, but also disabled any fail-safes against the inital disabling, which caused her computer to overheat. Like you, NationSquid, I dunno if that would actually cause it to go up in flames or not, but I just wanted to add some context to that scene.
Anyway, I like that you covered what is essentially an urban legend, while explaining some of the logistics of it, instead of just calling it a hoax and calling it a day. I definitely learned a few things from this video.
Im no expert but I would assume a CPU would physicaly destroy itself from the heat before the computer could catch on flames
@Amphibax I was only giving context to the scene and not claiming that they depicted things accurately.
You can reprogram a battery charging controller to set e.g. the cell voltage limit instead of 4.2V to e.g. 4.8V, so during the next charge it will go kaboom with a fireball. (Such tests were verified on old Mac laptops.) In more sophisticated charge balancer chips it may be even possible to transfer charge from one cell to another to intentionally overcharge one of them to set it on fire without need of a mains connection to a charger. While the Bones story is too madeup (binary code printed on a scanned skeleton), setting a battery ablaze by software manipulation is in no way impossible.
While still farfetched, this Bones storyline is at least more believable than that NCIS episode in which two people were typing on the same keyboard at the same time to stop a hacker.
@@afbastidas And how the hack was somehow stopped by Gibbs unplugging the computer, even though it was still connected to the network.
There are BIOS or UEFI viruses. There are even UEFI or BIOS scanners, like ESET has a UEFI scanner in it's EIS suitue. The "spread through the air" "don't care about airgap" is not very realistic.
I thought those were only for the early generations of UEFI
@@petevenuti7355not only that but some modern pcs too
@@thatoneglitchpokemon really? without having to disable secure boot or anything other security features?
If that's true, it makes the whole UEFI thing seem like a pain in the ass & waste of time .
Just run a Linux BIOS with emulator
no airgap is actually a real thing
@@petevenuti7355well, you are right, without secure boot, it's kinda impossible. still saying that, some legitamite services require secure boot to be turned off, and that can lead to some viruses leaking into uefi
1:08
"You need some kind of connection to a computer"
Hackers in 2050: *Brain-computer interface*
I remember when one time Mutahar from SomeOrdinaryGamers said that when EAS is used in Japan some special signal is broadcasted that turns devices (like TV's) on to show the emergency broadcast (and then they start to emit that sound to activate more devices). No idea if it would work on PC's as well tho
I'm going to assume that Japanese televisions are specifically programmed to detect that sound and display the broadcast when they hear it. You couldn't just play that sound to any TV and have it react that way.
If that was possible loads of trolls would just play the sound
It dont need to be a bios virus. It could have imbedded itself in the factory image of the backup so that it couldnt be removed by a reset. Got 4 bugs myself that does this.
Some consumer grade Lenovo laptop types came with Chinese adware infested bios, that automatically reinstalled adware/spaware into the Windows partition when installing Windows.
Sending data thru sound without errors is technically possible. We can use two different frequencies to represent high bit (1) and low bit (0) then add error correction such as hamming code. However, implementing this on BIOS is almost impossible because hacker need to squeeze the required hardware drivers into teeny tiny BIOS storage.
The claim that acoustic background noise would make it fail is nonsense. Check how noisy e.g. the GPS satellite signal is, but they use plenty of CRC to reconstruct valid data. It only makes a modem connection slower.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 CRC can reconstruct? I didn't knew that before
@@KangJangkrik I mean error correction algorithms. CRC/checksums are the basis of that.
I’m surprise you didn’t talk about SSTV at all, it’s what nasa used to send images back from space and such it’s really cool
Yes absolutely really cool! Unfortunately the SSTV transmitter on the ISS is currently broken and awaiting repair last I checked :(
Macbook Air's don't have CD drives.
The way you explain stuff for us is so good. Like using the example of covering up a part of a picture of urself vs a QR code and the example of speaking French to a person who speaks English and the examples like that are SO helpful for me to understand. I subscribed because you take complex topics that I want to understand and make them something that I can understand and I love it
There is one possibility you didn't cover, and that is that the hardware shipped infected from the factory. Most computers are made in China (even MacBooks), and a lot of them are made from OEM manufacturers like Foxconn (even MacBooks). There has already been documented cases of chinese made american electronics "calling home" to chinese servers. If companies like Foxconn is instructed to ship computers and phones they make with infected firmware, they sure can. And then they can lay dormant until some weird code is transmitted via sound. Maybe even embedded into a hit song for all that I know.
I believe this to be the most likely scenario, although this story itself seems very unlikely. All of it is theoretically possible, but to actually carry this out in the real world would be expensive and really difficult. Unless you're the corrupt government of one of the largest economies in the world.
But in that scenario why should the virus make itself noticable? When your just stealing data its best stay hidden and never getting noticed. Still in theory one of the best explanaitions.
thats awesome to know
leave China out of your silly little ghost stories
Listening to this at the gym, never missing a a new nation squid vid
don’t skip leg day brother
5:34 sponsor😊 ends
My phone can read the QR code at 16:56 perfectly line. The QR standard includes error correction bits for when a QR has been partially occluded.
It's hilarious that nationsquid has no idea about this when there are 5 comments about error correction
10:20 don't think I didn't notice the very obscure very early Green Day track! Well played!
What MacBook Air has ever had a CD-Drive??
You can use Music to listen to the music on your CDs. In the Music app on your Mac, insert an audio CD into your computer's CD or DVD drive, or into an external drive that's connected to your computer.
Apple said that idk
I don't have a microphone so I don't have to worry about this extinct virus 🗿
Lol
I was wondering when the legend would upload once again. I love these types of videos! :)
This would require physical manipulation of the BIOS chips, which is impossible on a large scale
Possibly your best virus video.
I presume this is the same kinda thing when you call a mobile but it's still ringing but breaks for a slight second where you can hear the other person's phone but hasn't picked up yet. And continues ringing
What's that? Really?
6:28 malware can exist in the hard drive’s firmware persisting after wipes
I swear the sound at 11:27 feels like it's in my _throat._
Bro fr
What if he was trying to get people thinking about the security of other parts of computer hardware and software? Sure, in this specific representation, the likelihood of a virus acting that way is slim... but it makes you wonder what else is actually possible.
I mean as a 2000s kid, these virus lore are a lot better than the sonic.exe tech horror I was brought up with
That QR Code probably would have scanned just fine. QR Codes typically include error correction. The image you transmitted could have been formatted with error correction as well.
Thinking about this I should probably scan it
Not the first virus to spread through the air. Older cellphones were retransmitting a virus that was only known to drain the battery faster because it turned up the antenna gain way before this instance. I was previously laughed at by an IT technician after I told them that I had seen a virus hit my PC's BIOS. Anything that is programmable can be volatile. Your "UEFI" works at a High Level. Most viruses that affect the BIOS are at a Low-Level which some are programmed to inject code into the host OS. They can even reach internet channels if they are programmed to do so. Low Level programming is well ahead of any of the brains of any educated programmer of today because they were never taught to utilize it. Most programs run on 3-5 tiers of High-Level programming and will be infected if any lower tiers are affected in some way.
Ok, I'm rambling... For your "Air Virus". It is known that some CPU's have an address volatility problem where if an instruction was sent to an address it would execute it. The sound of a computer is controlled by a DAC and that DAC communicates on a CPU BUS. If a certain set of instructions were to leak past where the CPU would mistakenly run the code it would become infected. The code would not have to be majorly complex. Just the code would have to act if it was part of the CPU bus to be executed. It would literally bypass the OS, UEFI and BIOS directly hitting the CPU. The code itself can be smaller than this following string of text... "Open sound device. Transmit code. Save code." It could be more complex but not much needed to be of any great size. We are talking about bits and bytes here working at the lowest level where you only can see the highest level unless you have the tools to read each instruction as it happens which does need specialty equipment
Early AMD K6-series CPUs had a bug that could crash them by reading certain bit patterns (even within e.g. a jpeg picture) and so caused mysterious lockups. I don't know if this could actually execute code, but if the bits came decoded from audio-in (I very much doubt that it is possible without CRC error correction) it hypothetically might be possible to be fooled to execute arbitrary code only played as sound into a microphone.
my guy looks like the 90's "mature for my age" 19y old skater who smokes in the skatepark that my parents told me not to hang out with
My man, Rod Serling would’ve been dang proud of your intro
No premier? Thats new😂 good editing ad always !
11:58 "communicating with sound is not at all unheard of" that's because you have to hear to communicate with sound. Even animals do it
I'm surprised the Intel Management Engine or AMD Platform Security Processor weren't considered as possible parts of the explanation
Exactly. The sound receiving backdoor is likely default part of the firmware requested by national agencies. Mobile phones are legally requested to contain a similar spy mode "roving bug" in its Baseband OS as official part of US mobile radio standard (i.e. sale of phones without would be illegal in USA). UEFI and BIOS are made by few companies and differ only in their config, thus the same sound modem code can easily run on many different hardwares.
The presentation of this video gives me some good old tabloid vibes. Had a good laugh, haha))
That said, this virus is somewhat plausible. At least in theory. BIOS have access to wifi and bluetooth hardware, so once it has taken control of that it can potentially spread itself through those networks onto other computers. At the same time though, the level of sofistication of a malware like this is unimaginable. Storing something so powerful on a very limited resources of a BIOS ROM doesn't seem possible for something so underpowered as macbook air.
This one seems to be fake, but with some tweaks it might be a good script for a halloween horror story aimed at IT audience!
“That which is claimed without evidence, can be rejected without evidence.”
alongside all the other points people are making here i'd add that most microphones of the era had a quality so terrible they likely couldn't pick up these supposed frequencies anyway. plus, many many devices did not have microphones at all. plus plus, there were many different soundcard drivers. there are so many reasons (other than these few that i immediately thought of) that would make this truly impossible
I had a bad case of computer virus infecting my PC back in 2010. It would disable the task manager on Windows XP and could not be deleted through a format and reinstalling of the OS. Don't know if it infected the BIOS or not but a computer repair shop was able to cleanse whatever was infected and put the PC in working order.
was this some sort of permission block virus
the only thing that comes to mind is that the virus got admin perms and locked all of your actions
but im unsure about the formatting part
How to cleanse your pc:
Step 1:
SCRUB
Most phones _are_ constantly listening for "OK Google" or "Siri". This could serve as an attack vector if you "spoke" a malformed sentence or something.
my favourite example of sound being used to communicate is the 2012 and boom furbies using ear-bleeding ultrasound
One thing worth noting is that error correcting code (ecc) exists. It's a means of putting redundant bits in data in case parts of the transmission are lost. One place you'll commonly see this is in methods of optically encoding data such as qr codes, bar codes and cds.
CRC is the most basic part of every modem standard, so transmitting a picture the analogue way like in this example is misleading or even needs to be rated disinformation.
16:57 The QR code is still readable! Thanks, error correction :D
So this whole thing was "the dial up noise came back to life and it hates you" only super high pitched to help hide it from the user
It's very unlikely that this does exist, but if it does, then it will probably be discovered that this is some kind of PRISM program-level backdoor discovered by someone who wasn't supposed to find it. You know, all those conspiracy theories about how your microphone can secretly be turned on at the BIOS level in a way software can't detect, so the NSA can listen in? If that turned out to be true, then it's equally possible that such a backdoor would also allow injecting code into the BIOS itself by playing a specific sound, if they do not like what the person is doing with their system and want to put a stop to it. There are some common components of UEFI firmware that are common to all BIOS manufacturers. It's absolutely true that this attack vector wouldn't be possible if nothing were programmed for a protocol that could translate sound into data. It also shouldn't be possible if microphones are correctly turned off at the hardware level and not listening when not in use by software. But if they are always on at the BIOS level and listening on some hidden protocol, well... then the attack is possible and ultimately a government somewhere is responsible for making it possible on purpose, and they should be held accountable if this is real. I don't believe an attack like that is possible unless someone out there intentionally inserted a backdoor into most computer's UEFI firmware to make it possible, on purpose. Possibly if it wasn't our government, then Russia or China leaned on the UEFI manufacturers and got this put in. It would be that level of interference.
советский россии хорошо !
Also mobile phones are legally requested to contain a similar spy mode "roving bug" in its Baseband OS as official part of US mobile radio standard (i.e. sale of phones without would be illegal in USA). That PCs need to contain such backdoors for use by national bureaus is absolutely plausible.
To me it just sounds like a creepypasta. Plus, since there's no evidence, I personally believe, it's not real.
It's most likely exactly that, a creepypasta hoax.
The vocal fry on this man. This is the voice Malware would speak with.
I’m happy I’m not the only who noticed haha. It was distracting to me. 👀
It’s impressive how Pwn2Own still happens yearly to this very day even after the BadBIOS incident!
HAM radio operators have their own thing of sound-to-data, called SSTV. They send a ~30 second beepidy-boop through the shortwave band and the receiver, who can be thousands of miles away unter certain circumstances, can restore a low resolution still image from that. Basically you can send memes around the globe without internet. Sometimes even the ISS sends SSTV images, but you gotta plan the reception, because you can only get the signal if the station is visible at "your" sky.
But it gets even crazier, a lesser known standard called NBTV whis is even lower resolution, but the image can move like a GIF.
If anyone was wondering, the QR code leads to a Beatles song. I'm just happy it wasn't a Rick roll or the Josh Hutcherson edit.
0:47 Could this be part of the origin of Kamen Rider Ex-aid's bugster virus?
10:38 I think in one of the8bitguy's videos he got the c64 floppy disc drive to "read" a program just by playing a sound file near the drive?
tf why isnt this channel more popular
Love the shirt!! Halt and Catch Fire is so underrated.
Nice Green Day reference @10:19. Kudos, sir.
How would the infected computer be able to tell the uninfected computers through sound if they weren't listening? Meaning if the mic isn't on.
radio waves :D
Something i don't understand about this is that the sound wave theory only works if the receiving device has a way to execute code through sound input AND needs to be actively listening and, as far as I'm aware, even when it is listening like in cases of voice assistants, it still can't execute code from it
Thought I'd chime in here that you can put BIOS-embedded viruses into ANYTHING that has a flashable BIOS chip in it!
Graphics cards, Network cards, Mainboard BIOSes, USB and Sound Driver BIOSes and a whole lot more! In the old days we embedded viruses into the Adlib and Soundblaster audio card bioses which recorded keystrokes all day long into non-volatile RAM or hiddens ectors in local free HARD DRIVE space and then exfiltrated the recorded keystrokes into compressed data files that were then played back as above-human-hearing ultrasound beeps and boops coming from the inside-computer-case speaker which were interpreted by "spies" or packages left outside offices or via cleaning personnel that recorded the beeps and boops for later interpretation. Even if a machine was turned OFF, the adlib or soundblaster card could STILL beep and boop at ultrasonic frequencies since it was self-powered long-enough to sound the bits and bytes as sound-based data. The on-site counter-intelligence personnel were always looking for RADIO WAVES and not ultrasonic sound waves so these were always overlooked! The sonic range was limited and data exfiltration was SLOOOOOOW but it worked very well!
It's how Soviet, Chinese and other target agencies were spied upon in the 1980's and 1990's
Nowadays, I can exfiltrate data from a computer by pulsing any onboard LED lights by blinking them based upon amplitude, time, frequency at very high data rates. I can also use the electrical whine of CPU and GPU components to exfiltrate recorded keystroke or on-screen image-captured data by purposefully pulsing or writing to certain parts of the CPU and CPU or your hard disk or SSD drive to create a high frquency or low-frequency machine-discernable whine or machine-discernable EM field waveform that contains the data I want to grab from you. Most agencies overlook such techniques but we don't!
I can even blink and change the refresh rate of your display in order exfiltrate data OR even embed Steganographic data into the on-screen monitor display as it comes out the GPU card or via EM fields that are part of the power-down/power-up circuits or part of any on-display LED light to allow for data exfiltration. Any part of your PC or game console or TV that can click, whine, hum or beem and boop can be used to exfiltrate your captured private data whenever we feel like!
I can get YOUR DATA from ANYWHERE at ANYTIME !!!!
V
That kind of stuff is pretty well documented, (though some of your details are off) but it still requires some way to infect the target system to load the spyware in the first place.
AdLib BIOS? Must be using the flash memory in the LM386.
@@BrainStormzFTC I have the details down quite pat since I KNOW the methods directly involved! The Adlib cards were BIOS changed at the Burnaby, BC, Canada fcatory in the 1980's BEFORE they were shipped out and the Soundblaster cards had the changes made just after the Singapore/Malaysia warehouse and/or factories shipped them out.
The Soviet tended to buy LOTS of computer gear from West Germany at the time using "secret purchasers" who were actually tracked by various Western 3 and 4 letter agencies and so West Germany was flooded with the cards at specific dealers to ensure that the changed cards would be bought by the Soviet-controlled purchasers OR that a specific target purchaser person was shipped the changed cards.
The Soviets weren't dumb so they CHECKED OUT the computer systems quite intensely BUT various HIDDEN changes ensured that the checks they did do would MATCH the expected checksum output values of both the unchanged AND changed cards.
Cleaning and maintenance personnel were EXTENSIVELY compromised to unwittingly gather exfiltrated data from keystroke recordings and MS-DOS-screen ASCII-based data captures and higher level graphics workstation-specific bitmap screen captures.
Those old computers had MINIMAL MEMORY usually One Megabyte to Four Megabytes (NOT GIGABYTES but MEGABYTES!) of System RAM and maybe 5 to 20 Megabyte disk drives so secret disk sectors had to be hidden and managed very well in order to store the daily recordings made by the changed BIOS software so the IT personnel wouldn't notice the changes or recordings.
Compression was a VERY BIG DEAL in those days and the NSA (National Security Agency) in the USA spent MILLIONS of USD on PhD-level Math experts doing nothing but designing and coding advanced compression and encryption algorithms still used and KEPT SECRET EVEN TODAY!
Using an Intelligence Agency Example, those data exfiltration techniques in around the mid-1980's were but ONE WAY western agencies figured out just how far ahead the Soviets were in DESIGNING and TESTING Explosive Lensing techniques used in Large-Yield Nuclear and High-Explosive Conventional weapons system development where they designed and welded thick steel panels to make 8 foot thick (2.5 metres thick!) hollow spheres out of solid steel so they can record and figure out HOW explosions actually detonated, propogated and reflected INSIDE those thick spheres.
The data recorded in real-time at the physics-based level, let the Soviets become able to model NEW explosive designs to make SMALLER AND MORE POWERFUL weapons systems than the west could make! Just that development put them 15 to 20 years ahead of the west!
That is just ONE example of what was found out!
V
@@nickwallette6201 There were small memory spaces AND added non-volatile RAM-space where data could be processed hidden on the changed cards. The 8-bit microcontrollers were good enough to do quite an amount of processing. The Apollo SPACE program that landed people on the Moon has MUCH LESS CPU horsepower than the Adlib and Soundblaster audio cards of those days in the 1980's and 1990's! Network cards, GPU cards and RAM expansion cards were ALSO extensively modded to be shipped over to West Germany to ensure the Soviets would get modded gear that could be spied upon by western agencies!
You should have seen DefSec Caspar Weinberger's face in the mid-1980-'s face on the day he found out the Soviet Gas and Oil Pipelines got blown up REAL GOOD by INTENTIONALLY MODDED micro-controllers and controller software that the Soviets stole and/or bought from the West!
It was the Stuxnet of the 1980's using POSITIVELY ANCIENT computer CPU horsepower! My smartwatch has more CPU horsepower than ALL of those systems combined! The Western Intelligence did quite a lot with the very limited processing power they had!
Nowadays, I have a Terabyte of System RAM worth of at-my-office Super-Workstation that has over a PETAFLOP worth of GPU horsepower attached to it! What they could have done with that sort of CPU/GPU horsepower in those days would be mind-boggling! And the parent company paid less than $250,000 CDN for it all just a couple of years ago!
The average STUDENT today has more CPU/GPU horsepower in their smartphone and laptop than the ENTIRE NSA had in 1985!
V
The last paragraph is a little extreme...
Always a pleasure to see the Squid Kid! 😍
Most speakers and microphones are engineered to work between 2Khz - 20Khz. To actually transmit with sound, and not be heard by humans, you'd need something higher than 25Khz, and good luck finding equipment that can do that unless you're willing to spend stupid amounts of money.
Even Alexa smart speakers can be fooled to listen to human unhearable ultrasound frequencies >100 kHz. Most modern soundcards internally sample at much higher frequencies than CD quality and hence prebugged firmware can use it.
You do a great job explaining such complex topics
The definition at the beginning is for a worm, not a virus but the term “virus” is often used interchangeably with “malware”. A virus inserts itself into an existing program or file.
Why do I feel like that QR code led to a Rick roll?
You forgot hardware instruction sets , hardware abstraction layers which are essential for any computer , then error checking and correcting etc which are all hardware based as well as software , you can implement AES-NI instruction in software if your hardware supports it , just like the TPM thing now. Then , there are metadata that OS uses to identify stuff , not much nowadays , but in past it was very important. In early days of computing , and even 10 years from that story , you had issues if your program was x86 based that it wont run on AMD , and so on , list is long , but you can perfectly do it on platforms like Raspberry Pi , Arduino and similar , as hardware and firmware isn't so smart , it interprets machine level code as it's thrown at it , without asking many questions. You can dig deeper in JFIF and EXIF exploits as they are very basic example on how computers interpret things.
DOS prompt wont prevent you from killing entire OS if you told it do so , nor will any other interpreter as long as it understands what it receives.
I worked in the government as an it tech. We had a virus that made the computer “sing”. We had to flash the bios and low level format the drive. So it did exist. And I hated that. We lost a lot of data because users refused to save to network. 😂
Luckily, he was in a very well shielded office using…Windows ME. Yeah. I know. 😂
at 16:56 your covering the most important part of the qr code, see. qr codes do indeed have error correction, but the part you covered contains very important info about the qr code (length, tracker and encoding)
Cover your asses, developers. Log every damn thing related to auth you can find and make sure the logs are stuffed in a vault somewhere. If this happens on systems running your software, you don't wanna catch that blame hammer.
16:55 Technically QR codes are built with so much redundancy and error correction that you could cover a LOT of the QR code before it actually becomes impossible to recover the data from it.
QR code gold! Good one, I'm glad curiosity got the best of me. 😉
Some computers also have IR sensors that are used for communicating. Given the chance I turn off everything like that.
I still expect to see malware spread via RFD.
MacBook Airs don't have optical drives. Never did. Even when Macs still had optical drives. That right there would be enough to discredit him in my eyes. lol
You know it's a great day when a new NationSquid video drops!
Something very similar happened to me back in 2013. I had to physically change the actual HDD because wiping the whole system didn't actually work.