Imagine the day when rootkits, backdoors and other hacker toolkits hide not inside the system software, but in the highly programmable firmware proliferating across the hardware components supporting our information systems. This lower layer - the flashable firmware and processors running on dozens of components in today's computing devices - is already being exploited in proof-of-concept tests by a handful of security researchers. They say that we may not be seeing firmware used in attacks right now, but the day is coming when, after having shorn up today's holes on the application layer, that malware will be pushed to this lower layer.
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