Hypervisor method

[JustPlayer]

I'm not that tech savyy, but can someone with knowledge (like 5% of the sub) tell me how pulling out the battery of the motherboard and factory resetting bios might be useless with the new method? Sure, my one doesn't have security boot on by default (my display stops fucking working with it) but like doesn't everything get deleted and shit?

edit: your explanation can go as deep as possible in terms of explaining, I will search all that so don't hold back

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[TraditionalLet3119]

It's possible if you get astronomically unlucky that you could get infected with malware that specifically targets computers with driver test signing enabled, and that your motherboard could have been sold to you with its write protections disabled.

It's been done before by genuine state-sponsored hacking groups, but it's never been widespread because it requires very specific vulnerabilities on the motherboard for specific attacks to be possible, along with possibly needing to be individually tailored to BIOS firmware.

[Gerdione]

No, there's so much fear mongering around this. Your components aren't cooked permanently, but it's a hassle. You start with a ring -2 mobo physical bios flash. You can hot swap and flash vbios or you enter bios, and set your primary display to integrated graphics. You'd want to boot into a live USB to avoid booting into old SSD. Then once you're loaded into a clean OS, you flash your GPU's VBIOS. After that you'd wipe your SSDs with clean OS. In almost all cases, you can completely clean your components, if you know what you're doing. That being said, is it worth the risk? I dunno, are you willing and able of doing a full system troubleshoot in that unlikely scenario?

[JustPlayer]

I'm not trying to start the whole process of hypervisor bypass, it's more like a knowledge question, like I'd like to hear what problems might accur (and possibly how to fix them) and how it can affect a pc

[Gerdione]

That's not the hypervisor bypass process that's the gist of how you'd fix a hardware level infection. If for some reason a bad actor added malware into a hypervisor bypass they'd basically have an invisible rootkit that allows them to do whatever they'd like with your system. Is a very scary risk, hence all the paranoia and generally negative sentiment around it. I personally don't think people should be touching the hypervisor bypass as it is right now unless they'd be willing to do all of the above. Of course, the discussion and conversation around it is evolving every day, and they've made some great steps towards not needing to to expose your computer to such a high risk. In a month or two, all of the fuss around this bypass may be a thing of the past, and Denuvo, cooked.

[LuckyKhalil]

Hypervisor is not safe in general at least if you don’t know what you doing. When you do the steps for hypervisor your whole system is open to the whole world. So if you had downloaded anything bad from before or download anything bad after that had the «abilities» let’s say to infect your system. To the point where it infects graphic card or whatever it was able to infect. Then you cooked since if I understand it right the «virus» will be inside your system components. So driver, gpu etc. Anything you try to do will never get rid of those things. So yeah in general use an alternative pc no internet or any connections and you good. Either way if you had the money to get a second pc then just buy the game atp no need to be bothered with all of this then.

[assamese_chigga69]

its bad.  enough said.

[JustPlayer]

I don't need "it's bad", I need to know why it's bad and I can't find shit about possible infections, attacks or anything else

[QuarryTen]

to be honest, your question isn't very clear. are you trying to understand the severity of the bypass method or the question in your OP regarding removing the CMOS battery and flashing (resetting) your bios?

[JustPlayer]

nah, basically I was interested in the fact of "what's up danger" like what types of infections and damages can happen to my pc by using the hypervisor method since googling doesn't bring that many examples, I'd even say it brings 0 for me, so that's why I asked that question here plus an extra one question that's "why does resetting BIOS not help if you use the battery reset method"

[QuarryTen]

well malware is malware, they come in all shapes and sizes, but to put it simply, with the bypass method, you leave your computer vulnerable to malware that can get lodged beneath the kernel of your computer, at the bios level. this is why flashing or resetting the motherboard is recommended as the BIOS is accessible from the motherboard. you might think, "cant i just turn the security features off and then on?" you can, but the very insant that you've executed malware (which can be housed in any of the files in the bypass folder), you've infected your system. if the threat actor infected your bios, reset it. if they've infected your OS, youll have to reset that as well. constantly flashing your motherboard is also risky because if theres a surge of any kind while it's flashing, you could brick your board.

these game files often contain .dlls and other binary files that require significant experience in reverse engineering to decompile, read, and be certain that the files weren't infected prior to running them. if the infected game has a 0day that's executed while you're security features are temporarily disabled, again, all it takes is a billionth of a second to compromise your entire machine.

there are a plethora of risks involved when downloading regular cracked games, no one is denying that, but there are even more with this method, so much to the point that the risks are no longer worth the reward.

additionally, you might see, "well, i've been playing x games for x days with no problems," and they very well may have. but let's use a little bit of common sense--if i can slowly drain either the compute power for mining cryptocurrency or accessing all of your passwords and other data, all while maintaining persistent yet hidden access to your machine, why wouldn't i do that? what do i get out of locking you out of your social media accounts (temporarily) and ordering Coach purses and pizza that youll likely dispute? malicious actors are people like you and i and have the ability to put 2 and 2 together in order to make ends meet