PSA: It’s time to update the BIOS on some older Asus motherboards

I’ll be honest: BIOS updates give me the willies. Unfortunately, even as such a source of undue anxiety, they are still well worth staying on top of. Case in point, the latest BIOS update from Asus addresses a vulnerability found in motherboards for 8th and 9th Gen Intel chips.

The vulnerability in question is described as “Improper initialization in an ASUS certain motherboard [sic] allows an physically proximate user to read or write arbitrary memory by inserting a specially crafted device.” Basically, a bad actor would need to be in the same room as an affected PC to exploit this vulnerability. Even though local access is required, it’s still a pretty serious issue.