This feature is invisible to you, but invisible to hackers
Gigabyte has good intentions and designed a feature on the motherboard that calls home after every reboot to check if there is new firmware that can be installed automatically without the user having to do anything. According to an Ars Technica article, this appears to be more firmware for various features the motherboard offers, such as audio and networking, than his BIOS update. We don’t like computers silently calling home. Gigabyte showed good intentions, but should have included a way to disable it for users who didn’t want to update their computers without intervention.
But Gigabyte’s automatic firmware update has a big problem, it’s laughably insecure, and it’s used to load software onto the computers of ignorant people. Researchers at Eclypsium have discovered an invisible updater that downloads code without properly authenticating it and even downloading it over HTTP. This allows an attacker to dump almost any code onto the machine, thus increasing the attack surface, but the user is even more unwise.
Worse, the issue is unlikely to be fixed in an update, leaving millions of Gigabyte motherboard owners vulnerable until the next motherboard upgrade.
