Have I got a BIOS virus - April 1st?

swift1_2

Turned on my laptop today (Toshiba satellite 5200, XP Home SP2, KIS 2009) whilst booting into windows it hanged (its been doing that a lot lately but mainly in windows, I've reinstalled XP twice, it still does it). Turned it off then on, the LCD screen at the bottom which normally says 'Welcome' on boot up now said 'update BIOS' and the hard drive indicator was fully on for about a couple of mins, then it turned it self off. I turned laptop back on and booted into windows fine. (I had not updated any BIOS stuff myself - there were some xp updates when I turned off the computer last night but that shouldn't update the bios?)

I'm running a full scan and downloaded sophos anti-rootkit, sophos is playing havoc with kis as it appears to come up with random .exe files. Full scan doesn't appear to have come up with anything. I understand KIS only has a 44% detection rate!

If I flash the bios with one downloaded from the toshiba website will that remove any rootkit virus installed.

gaming_guy

if you flash the wrong bios, you could end up with an expensive door stop. Flashing the bios will not remove any rootkits.

KIS is one of the better security suites and has a good detection rate.

Run malwarebytes and see if that comes back with any infections

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=31422803&postcount=3

RobertoMoir

"Have I got a Bios Virus".

No, because they don't exist. Not in the wild anyway.

"If I flash the bios with one downloaded from the toshiba website will that remove any rootkit virus installed."

No, for the same reason that buying new tyres won't fill in the potholes on the road outside your house. As Gaming_Guy says, flashing with the wrong BIOS will either just not work or essentially will turn your computer into a doorstop.

There have been a couple of viruses that write garbage to the BIOS/CMOS, but these are very old and should easily be picked up by modern AV, and besides, they don't "infect your bios", they're more like flashing with a (very) wrong BIOS update that trashes the computer. If it starts to boot on power on then these viruses are not likely to be your problem.