I seem to have come across an interesting virus and was wondering how often these types of viruses are found, and if there is any way to clean your system from them?
The virus appears to occupy an address space of the BIOS that is not generally used by the BIOS code. As a result, flashing the system does not overwrite the virus. Once then executed it accesses the full encrypted portion of the virus on the hard drive. The virus can then do some very interesting things. In one instance I was able to determine that the virus would look for all new or modified files from the last 24 hours. After that the virus would then compress, encrypt, and upload the files to a DropBox account (or other online storage sites). A way of spreading was via USB storage devices. The virus was also to run on any O/S (in my case Ubuntu, Win7, Win10).
Has anyone else come across such viruses before? No anti-virus scanner that I tried would detect it. It appeared the only solution was to throw the notebook in the garbage. I had four notebooks that were infected, and the cost to me was high. It also infected my NAS' (1 x QNAP, and 2 x NetGear. All had 4 x 3TB hard drives, RAID5, and the virus was programmed to delete everything. I lost 7 years of my life, and every family photo.