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Enlarge (credit: University of Reading)

The Berkshire hilltop where metal detector hobbyists found a warrior's grave was supposed to have been an unimportant patch of borderland between neighboring tribes 1,400 years ago. But the warrior, buried with a view of the Thames River valley and all the trappings of power and status, tells a different story. His presence suggests that this quiet bit of English countryside may have been in the thick of the power struggles that rippled across Britain in the decades after the Roman Empire receded.

Around 400 CE, Rome abandoned its far-flung colony in Britain and withdrew its troops back to the mainland of Europe. Not long after that, Germanic warriors from the continent swept onto the island: the forerunners of the Anglo-Saxons. Archaeologists don’t entirely agree on whether the Anglo-Saxons arrived as a huge wave of settlers who overwhelmed and replaced the native Britons, or whether only a smaller number of warriors came to Britain to seize power in the wake of Rome’s departure. Either way, they reshaped British culture and society over the next several centuries.

The Anglo-Saxon tribes banded together under strong military leaders. Over time, some of those groups would coalesce into the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, and Kent. Others faded from power, wiped out or absorbed by their rivals. And that brings us to the stretch of the Thames River between Oxford and London, and the man archaeologists have nicknamed the Marlow Warlord.

Enlarge / Software security concept. Errors in the program. Bugs in the program. The presence of a backdoor, rootkit. (credit: sasha85ru | Getty Imates)

For only the second time in the annals of cybersecurity, researchers have found real-world malware lurking in the UEFI, the low-level and highly opaque firmware required to boot up nearly every modern computer.

As software that bridges a PC’s device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—is an operating system in its own right. It’s located in a SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch the code. And it’s the first thing to be run when a computer is turned on, allowing it influence or even control the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows.

Those characteristics make the UEFI the perfect place to stash malware, and that’s just what an unknown attack group has done, according to new research presented on Monday by security firm Kaspersky Lab.

Enlarge / Software security concept. Errors in the program. Bugs in the program. The presence of a backdoor, rootkit. (credit: sasha85ru | Getty Imates)

For only the second time in the annals of cybersecurity, researchers have found real-world malware lurking in the UEFI, the low-level and highly opaque firmware required to boot up nearly every modern computer.

As software that bridges a PC’s device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—is an operating system in its own right. It’s located in a SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch the code. And it’s the first thing to be run when a computer is turned on, allowing it influence or even control the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows.

Those characteristics make the UEFI the perfect place to stash malware, and that’s just what an unknown attack group has done, according to new research presented on Monday by security firm Kaspersky Lab.