Interesting Read & A Question

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afib
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Scriptonaut
Joined: 2011/12/06

I had vaguely heard of flashing blocks of the BIOS with a virus a number of years ago, but didn't really give it much thought at the time. Today, I came across some articles regarding the matter, so I dug a little deeper.

Undoubtedly many of you have heard of these, but the approaches are interesting IMO.

New BIOS Virus Withstands HDD Wipes:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/bios-virus-rootkit-security-backdoor,74...

CIH (computer virus):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH_%28computer_virus%29

Mebromi:
http://blog.webroot.com/2011/09/13/mebromi-the-first-bios-rootkit-in-the...

Question: Regarding the first link, since Python is a high level language, I assumed that you could not easily write to the BIOS with it? I always thought that handling low level memory, or even just non-virtual memory was the domain of lower level languages, like Asm or even C++. I have never really programmed anything that had to do with memory functions, even when I played in Asm. I didn't give it enough time to be honest and I only wanted to learn it because some pretty awesome SNES/NES/GB emulators were written in Asm.

So, have I been wrong in that assumption or is there something special about Python besides its code readability?