Researcher Discovers Security Flaw In Lenovo Computers

As much as we’d all love our computing products to be 100% secure, the sad fact is that this isn’t always the case. In fact just recently, security researcher Dymtro “Cr4sh” Oleksiuk has revealed that Lenovo’s computers have a pretty critical security flaw discovered within them that if exploited, would allow hackers to circumvent the basic security protocols put into place by Windows.

According to Oleksiuk’s post on GitHub, “This code exploits 0day privileges escalation vulnerability (or backdoor?) in SystemSmmRuntimeRt UEFI driver (GUID is 7C79AC8C-5E6C-4E3D-BA6F-C260EE7C172E) of Lenovo firmware. Vulnerability is present in all of the ThinkPad series laptops, the oldest one that I have checked is X220 and the neweset one is T450s (with latest firmware versions available at this moment).”

He adds, “Running of arbitrary System Management Mode code allows attacker to disable flash write protection and infect platform firmware, disable Secure Boot, bypass Virtual Secure Mode (Credential Guard, etc.) on Windows 10 Enterprise and do others evil things.” Now it seems that Lenovo wasn’t too pleased with his disclosure as they wanted to speak to him first before he released the details.

That being said, this does not appear to be Lenovo’s fault. The code used appeared to have been supplied by a third-party working from common code coming from Intel. Lenovo has since stated that they are investigating the matter and are working to close the vulnerability as soon as possible.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Lenovo, Security