Dragos ruiu biography

BadBIOS is alleged malware described by network security researcher Dragos Ruiu in October 2013 with the ability to communicate between instances of itself.
Dragos Ruiu.
Also: Dragos Ruiu is primarily a security conference organizer, not a researcher.

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(Phys.org) —Highly respected Canadian security expert Dragos Ruiu has been fighting, he claims, an unknown bit of malware that that appears to run on Windows, Mac OS X, BSD and Linux, for approximately three years. After much research and effort, which he has been documenting using several online venues (mainly Twitter), he says he believes the malware infects computers via memory sticks, and vice versa. He says also that he's found evidence that the malware is able to create mini-networks between infected machines using high frequency sound waves that are passed from a computer's microphone to another's speakers, and vice-versa. Unfortunately, at this time, Ruiu is the only person that appears to know about the malware, which he has dubbed badBIOS.

All of the things Ruiu has described have been seen before, just not all together. The Stuxnet virus, for example, was passed to infected machines from memory sticks, and high-frequency sound waves have been used to send network packets of information for years. What's troubling about badBIOS is that it's either infecting only Rui

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BadBIOS

BIOS-based computer malware

BadBIOS is alleged malware described by network security researcher Dragos Ruiu in October 2013^[1]^[2] with the ability to communicate between instances of itself across air gaps using ultrasonic communication between a computer's speakers and microphone.^[3]^[2] To date, there have been no proven occurrences of this malware.

Ruiu says that the malware is able to infect the BIOS of computers running Windows, Mac OS X, BSD and Linux as well as spread infection over USB flash drives.^[2] Rob Graham of Errata Security produced a detailed analysis^[4] of each element of the descriptions of BadBIOS's capabilities, describing the software as "plausible", whereas Paul Ducklin on the Sophos Naked Security blog^[5] suggested "It's possible, of course, that this is an elaborate hoax".^[1] After Ruiu posted data dumps which supposedly demonstrated the existence of the virus, "all signs of maliciousness were found to be normal and expected data".^[6]

In December 2013

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BadBIOS – the God of Malware?

Take your pick, because all four have been suggested. The one thing that few are doing is dismissing Dragos Ruiu, a highly respected researcher and consultant, and the man behind CanSecWest, PacSec and the Pwn2Own hacking contest. The malware has been dubbed BadBIOS; but what needs to be borne in mind is that no-one other than Ruiu has seen any sign of it.

Paul Ducklin listed some of the supposed capabilities of badBIOS: multi-platform; stops CD reboots; spreads via software-defined radio code even with all wireless hardware removed; infects the firmware on USB sticks; blocks Russian sites that deal with reflashing software; and spreads via the speakers on one machine to the microphone on another. But nobody other than Ruiu has seen any of this; and Ducklin concluded that we're just going to have to wait and watch.

Roger Grimes at InfoWorld asks if Ruiu had found a superbug, or gone crazy. He then proceeds to explain why he doesn't think there is a superbug.

But Jacob Appelbaum tweeted, "I think I know when and why @dragosr was owned. I al