[Arthalion]

But the point is someone could right now make a virus to flash your BIOS into oblivion

Actually, it's happened numerous times already. The problem with these viruses is that they tend to nuke the computer before they can spread very far, so their propogation is self-limited.

The biggest one I remember was in the early 90's, and it was a floppy transmitted self propogating trojan. IIRC, it sat on your computer spawning itself onto whatever unfortunate floppy you inserted until D-Day arrived. That morning, many thousands of people found bricks in their offices where their computers once sat.

Nobodies tried one recently because most virus writers are more interested in setting up dumb proxies, email relays, or DDOS zombies, not in doing actual damage to the computers. Still, there's no reason to think that someone couldn't attach the same kind of payload today to a more modern email Trojan and do serious damage.

One advantage we'd have, though, is that the virus has to specifically support the bios in the host machine. A bios virus written to attack a Dell bios won't do any real damage to a machine with a Phoenix bios, so the bios virus writers would have to specifically support all of the major bios types on the market. That tends to make the virus fairly large, and would slow its propogation.

[antiRepublicrat]

A bios virus written to attack a Dell bios won't do any real damage to a machine with a Phoenix bios, so the bios virus writers would have to specifically support all of the major bios types on the market.

I was thinking of that, but by supporting just Dell, AMI and Phoenix you could get a HUGE chunk of the PCs in use today.