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Since the dawn of time, the world has been filled with threats and those who try to understand them. And this applies to the digital world as well, and there was certainly a time, not too long ago in fact, where most people didn’t understand these threats at all. So, throughout the 1990s, on the NEW worldwide web, you end up having these mass panics of computer viruses with alleged capabilities that go beyond the screen, almost supernatural. And of course, many people rode on these fears either in jest or to obtain some kind of control on those who are gullible. Just like how the satirical tabloid “Weekly World News” once published a story about a computer virus that can spread to humans. Because that’s ridiculous! We all know how a computer virus works, it’s a malicious piece of code that is able to replicate itself and infect other computers on the same network, whether it’s the internet or some kind of local network, where it can then do whatever it is programmed TO do. And that’s the key, you need SOME kind of connection to another computer. It’s not a real virus in the literal sense; it can’t spread through the air, right?

Well in October of 2010, something very unnerving allegedly happened. A man named Dragos Ruiu, the main developer behind the annual Pwn2Own hacking competition. He had just installed a new copy of Mac OS X on his MacBook Air, and it was then that he started to notice the computer suddenly had a mind of its own. For starters, his CD drive was no longer working, he couldn’t boot from any CD placed into his system. He thought okay, maybe this was just a hardware issue, but then noticed that all of his system configurations kept undoing themselves. His system data then started getting deleted. He was starting to think that this wasn’t a hardware issue, but instead some kind of malware. So he went ahead and completely wiped the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system, but sure enough, the problem still persisted. As it turned out, this issue wasn’t coming from the hard drive, but the BIOS, the motherboard of the computer, meaning that even a full system restore couldn’t fix it. But it doesn’t even stop there. He noticed that this malware was now spreading across other computers on his network, even ones with different operating systems. He quickly disconnected them from his network, but it just kept going. And so, as a last resort, he disabled his Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and even unplugged the power from his wall, relying only on the battery. This is a technique called “air-gapping,” as these computers were now completely independent from one another, in their own separate worlds…yet the virus was still spreading, even to computers who were never connected to the internet in the first place.

The malware became known as “BadBIOS,” which was capable of infecting Mac, Windows, Linux, and BSD systems, and word quickly started getting around the internet that it may just be the very first instance of a computer virus spreading through the air, quite literally. Through its strange, completely unknown engineering, it was somehow able to bypass these “air gaps.” Surprisingly, it gets even weirder…actual word of the virus seems to have spread faster than the virus itself, and that’s because we...don’t even know if it exists. BadBIOS has become an incredibly controversial, divisive subject within niche parts of the tech community, with some people swearing by it, others scoffing at how ridiculous it is, and then those who believe it to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax. And today, we are going to talk about this strange origin story. This is BadBIOS, the world’s most mysterious computer virus.

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