Phlashing attack permanently destroys hardware over the network
A scary new (theoretical) malware attack, Phlashing, involves tricking a remote device into letting you flash its firmware so that the machine can't ever be rebooted, and must be pulled out and replaced. They're called it a "Permanent Denial of Service" (PDOS) attack -- there's a ton of tasty new coinages in this little bit of ugliness.Smith will demonstrate how network-enabled systems firmware is susceptible to a remote PDOS attack -- which he calls “phlashing” -- this week at the EUSecWest security conference in London. He’ll also unveil a fuzzing tool he developed that can be used to launch such an attack as well as to detect PDOS vulnerabilities in firmware systems.Link (via /.)His so-called PhlashDance tool fuzzes binaries in firmware and the firmware’s update application protocol to cause a PDOS, and it detects PDOS weaknesses across multiple embedded systems.
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