It’s not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission an entire line of affected hardware — as opposed to just applying software updates. But experts say that is exactly what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the company struggled to combat a sprawling malware threat which appears to have undermined its email security appliances in such a fundamental way that they can no longer be safely updated with software fixes.
And that is why complex, writable system firmware is a horrible idea.
Firmware should be in ROM, impossible to update aside from physically replacing the firmware chip, and it should be simple enough that it doesn’t need to be updated. Keep the fancy bells and whistles in storage that can be erased by the user. That way, if anything malicious gets in, all you have to do is power down the machine and wipe the storage device.
Inconvenient for IT departments? Yeah, maybe. But getting owned and then having to replace millions of dollars’ worth of hardware is surely even more inconvenient.
Yeah agreed. I hope other hardware makers are all taking note.