BIOS attack/virus Mint 17.2 HP DV9230us laptop

[markas]

I recently had an "interesting" experience that I wanted to share and see if anyone else has ever seen or heard of something similar.
My ISP recently upgraded me to an Arris tg1682g gateway and I was tweaking it and learning more about wifi security especially regarding vulnerabilities in the WPS system and the Xfinity wifi hotspot that comes activated on it by default. My web searches returned several sites about how to hack wifi that sounded interesting, and although I never intend to hack anyone else's wifi, i thought it might be interesting and informative to learn how to do it so that I could understand what was involved and how to better protect myself.
Well, I visited one of these pages, read the three paragraph introduction and then made the mistake of hitting the play arrow in a video window box that was offering to explain how to easily hack into someone's wifi. I don't even remember how the video started out because within a few seconds the Firefox title bar disappeared, my bottom Mint Cinnamon panel disappeared and I lost complete control of Firefox browser and most of my system. Control alt backspace no longer worked and I could not even find a way to open a terminal. I went for the power button and held it down until the machine turned off. As I expected, I was not able to reboot and the machine would briefly POST and then go to a mostly black screen with random areas of colored pixels. Luckily I had no important information on the system.
My first thought was to reboot with a Linux Mint Live USB and reinstall my OS if need be. I was in for a bit of an unwelcome surprise. Neither one of my two Mint 17.2(32bit & 64bit) USB sticks would boot. Both started to boot, but both hung and then when to black screen shortly after displaying the message, ""trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs " I was able to get into my BIOS and setup and everything appeared normal, but still no ability to boot from a USB. I also tried booting from an Xbuntu live DVD, but that did not work either. I then completely removed my Sandisk SSD Plus my two memory sticks, and disconnected the CMOS battery and waited 30 minutes. Reattached all but SSD and tried booting from USB again. Still a no go. My last ditch effort, and something amusing to me as someone who avoids Windows at all costs, was to try an old Win 7 install disk(pirated of course, none of my money to non-free people). First, I took my SSD to my desktop, disconnected all of its hard drives, attached my SSD to the B drive non bootable SATA connector and then booted that machine from a live USB containing Darik's Boot & Nuke and completely wiped the drive with that utility. Then I reinstalled it in my laptop and watched with a smirk as Win 7 installed in my machine without a problem. Now that I had my machine up I went to the HP website and reflashed the BIOS with the Windows Bios utility for my model available there. Now with what I hoped was a clean fresh BIOS and Win 7 running I tried to install Mint using my live USB keys. Still a no go. Being persistent, and having had success installing Win 7 via DVD, I tried my Xbuntu live DVD, and it actually worked. I did a dual install with Win 7 successfully. Now with a functioning Win 7 and Xbuntu dual install and functioning GRUB, I crossed my fingers and happily my Mint 17.2 USB WORKED and allowed me to do a clean install wiping out both Xbuntu and that stinky Win thing (that actually saved my day...lol).

I'm not sure exactly what happened to my machine, but I am pretty certain that it was the result of something nefarious done by a wise ass hacker who baited a fool like me with info about how to easily hack wifi. And, since the issue persisted even after I removed my SSD and memory and disconnected CMOS battery, I can come to no other conclusion that the problem or at least part of it affected my BIOS in a way that even persisted to some extent after I reflashed it.
I would love to hear any comments and see if any others have experienced anything like this. It makes sense to me that serious hackers might get off on attacking wannabes, especially those running gnu/linux. Having this happen with nothing more than a single click on a video seriously shook my feelings of safety using linux. Like most of us, I have had zero issues with viruses or malware(6 years for me) until now.

[Pjotr]

Could you send me a PM with the link to that video? I would like to test it in within the safe confines of a virtual machine.

[markas]

I'll look for it again and send it if I can find it. I don't save my history to Firefox sync and, obviously, I don't have it on this machine any longer as it has been wiped clean. I still have concerns about my BIOS because I did have problems booting from USB after I flashed it which only resolved after installing Win 7 and Xbuntu from DVD, but without any further BIOS changes. It was really odd. I am not an expert,so perhaps I overlooked something outside of my understanding, but not being able to boot from USB with no hard drive installed and after removing memory , etc. leaves only a BIOS issue by deduction.
Pretty sure it was a yahoo search so I'll see if I can dig it up without putting my machine in any more danger. Personally. I would not go near that page again even with a virtual machine. Speaking of that, maybe I'll search and see if it's possible to hack a virtual machine....then again, maybe not.

[Pjotr]

if it's possible to hack a virtual machine

It's certainly possible to hack a virtual machine (VM). But that doesn't matter, because it's sandboxed. So you can simply throw a spoiled VM away or revert it to a previous snapshot, thus undoing all changes.

[Pjotr]

I clicked the link that you sent me in a PM, but it did no harm at all, in my VM with a fully updated Linux Mint 17.2 Mate. Also consecutive clicks on that website did no harm.... There was no video on that website, though. Not that I could find, anyway.

[BigEasy]

BOIS may got corrupted because bad CMOS battery. But not only BIOS and not nesessary corrupted. In case of bad battery behavior of whole system may became unpredictable and depends of motherboard model. Just for example, once I have motherboard which normaly booting OS then absolutely randomly with random times hangs everything, application crashes, etc.
Try change battery to new one.

[Pjotr]

BOIS may got corrupted because bad CMOS battery. But not only BIOS and not nesessary corrupted. In case of bad battery behavior of whole system may became unpredictable and depends of motherboard model. Just for example, once I have motherboard which normaly booting OS then absolutely randomly with random times hangs everything, application crashes, etc.
Try change battery to new one.

That sounds more likely....