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Do you think any of that is relevant to the case of buying a barebones PC that doesn't include SSD or RAM, then adding those components yourself and installing a non-Windows OS?

If your MSI motherboard is installing Nahimic without an internet connection, it is doing so through a mechanism where the installer is made available to the OS in an ACPI table that Windows checks. That check can be disabled with a registry key to prevent such software from being re-installed, and the motherboard may have a BIOS option to disable the anti-feature (though the registry key method is generally more effective, since BIOS settings often get reset to defaults).



I think if a company is willing to ship windows malware they're also willing to ship UEFI malware.


Please don't ignore the points I've already made about how a firmware-based attack against a non-Windows OS is a lot hardware to pull off. I'm not asking if you think a company would be willing to ship such malware, I'm asking what kind of malware you think is realistically possible. What do you expect a UEFI-based malware to be capable of doing in this context, given the constraints of the hardware we're talking about?




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