Writing a Tiny x86 Bootloader

Not saying he is wrong or anything,but he seems to have missed how modern machines ship with UEFI which tries to solve this problem on firmware level.

That said: if you're curious and want to learn, I have no objections to digging into stuff, even "obsolete" stuff like BIOS boot :)

Please use left justification. The center justification makes reading the article much more difficult.

Thanks for giving it a look! You're certainly right about UEFI. I figured it would be easier and informative enough in the long run to just write a simple MBR bootloader instead of an EFI-format one.

Either way, it was definitely fun.

If you read this article, you'll understand just how easy it is to compromise so many computers. What I have seen infecting my own systems works on computers built in 2004 as well as new machines, so its exploiting the design and implementation of various international standards. The way it works, is the bios loads the malware irrespective of the boot drive order specified in the bios, and then it seems to rewrite the make and model of the hard drives and cd/dvd devices which you can only see by pausing the bios boot process on old machines. New pc's with SATA are too quick to even pause the part of the bios boot process which shows the hard ware make and model has been rewritten.

In ubuntu for example, whilst booting, ubuntu starts loading more of the malware from the metacache which suggest the hard drive cache may have been filled by the initial boot loader for the malware, again helping to hide the malware from detection. When booting different OS's, it works with XP, Ubuntu, Parted Magic, Kali, Tails and others. The OS's seem to actively hide the malware if you use a hex editor to scan the drive or infected files, so over time, some of that open source code has become compromised, and lets not forget the Dirty Cow exploit has been around since 2007 potentially making it possible to hack many different packages that make up the core Linux OS. It also seems to use SNMP to hack into managed switches, so whether this is getting into the Stuxnet/DuQu/DuQu2 territory, remains to be seen, but I would suggest it is, this then narrows it down to one country, because in maths its possible to calculate unknowns.

Remember, software always does what its told, unlike Humans and here in lies its weakness!

I actually looked this up after reading this comment. Best I could find after a quick google search was this: http://x86asm.net/articles/uefi-programming-first-steps/

which is certainly not an easy tutorial to follow. Seems like more robustness tends towards a greater barrier to entry.