Dear boss,
I'm calling in sick today - this fucking thing has the bright idea to update the firmware on its own.

Regards,
@C0D4

Thanks Dell update software and windows update.

@SortOfTested 😦you jinxed it, "Windows is updating"

It's going to be a long ass day, and it's only just started.

Well shit dude it's 5 o clock somewhere, crack a cold one and get started with me

> Updating IME
oh.

well.

have fun with that.

@C0D4 people really be out here bitching about updates when you can just disable the wuauserv service and not have to bother. Prevents updates hosing your mahine, too.

@Parzi domain based laptop, I can't control shit 😅

@C0D4 Try harder. https://pogostick.net/~pnh/... or https://hirensbootcd.org/download/ and replace the accessibility handler with CMD, then mash Shift after reboot before login. Either way, disable from registry.

@Parzi's got it right.
There are all sorts of ways around domain lockdowns. I learned many of them out of necessity, both by being under domain control for years, and later being the domain admin herself.

Ofc I let some people i liked and trusted circumvent the domain bs 😇. Everyone else suffered. ('cause otherwise they broke all the things)

@Root fascinating, my experience is shared among people? I was just a shithead in middle/high school (until it was done as pentesting by request >.>)

@Parzi Oh, absolutely. The domain lockdowns in high school were irritating, and outright made things difficult for computer classes. They were also so easy to work around it was a joke. They got harder every few months, so it was fun to find new ways around them. And ofc I would show all of my friends, too.

Tangent:

My computer science teacher in high school challenged us to break a computer. He had installed a DeepFreeze board in it, which is/was a hardware solution to reverting all changes made in software. It seriously had a lock with a physical key to disable it 😅. Anyway, a person uses the computer, reboots, and it's a clean, freshly imaged PC again.

Normal software changes dedinitely didn't persist, but when I started messing around with raw memory via assembly? The computer never behaved correctly after. Driver failures, windows update failures, visual studio no longer worked or reinstalled, the clock was screwy, .... Fortunately the school didn't demand I replace it.

Not a successful pentest because I couldn't explain exactly why it broke, or show how to apply it usefully in an exploit. But i certainly proved it didn't work as intended. And kind of ruined their computer in the process.

They ended up reimaging the machine and threw out the DeepFreeze board. 🤷‍♀️

@Root defeating hardware is way better than the shit i pulled...

they had a gay-ass homebrew watchdog they made and i managed to get it to accept Python (because why not write an essential boot-time watchdog driver in Python?) and apply it to all computers in the district. Every single one. Including, it turns out, all the various servers.

all the other shit was just misconfig exploits.

@Parzi
The pro stuff isn't much better. Half the products shipped by Juniper networks can be bypassed by having processes with specific names running and proxies rewriting responses with erroneous data.

@Parzi I loved doing things like that.
It's so easy to find flaws and exploit them. And so satisfying to turn controlware around.

@C0D4

"No worries, mate"
-- Your boss

To be fair, IME isn't the kind of thing I'd delay the software update for - or allow my clients to do so. If it breaks bad enough you can inject microcode.

me_too 😣
PC firmware is so not PC, because it never asks for consent

@hardfault that's starting to sound like rapeware to me.

How does that even work?! Can the BIOS connect to the fucking internet?

@C0D4 tf is rapeware lol

@OmerFlame non consensual - fuck me from behind - warez

@frogstair
Gonna guess a Dell Precision m5xxx

@SortOfTested not a day goes by you don't surprise me 😅

@frogstair precision 5520