Security researchers have discovered vulnerabilities in several Gigabyte firmware versions that allow hackers to disable UEFI security measures and take over the affected system. Proper exploitation can allow a hacker to elevate privileges and run arbitrary code.
This is not the first time such issues have been found. They were first discovered in AMI firmware, and the company promptly patched the issue. However, they were discovered again in Gigabyte firmware upon reinspection.
A team of security researchers from Binarly disclosed the issues to CERT/CC, which in turn passed them on to Gigabyte. They were found in the System Management Mode (SMM) — a CPU mode that handles low-level system operations and allows UEFI to interact directly with the hardware. Usually, SMM operations run within protected memory and can only be accessed via System Management Interrupt (SMI) handlers that use specific buffers to process data.
However, improper validation of these buffers can let hackers run malicious code before the operating system even loads into memory. A report from CERT/CC found the following vulnerabilities in Gigabyte’s firmware implementations:
- CVE-2025-7029
- CVE-2025-7028
- CVE-2025-7027
- CVE-2025-7026
All four of the aforementioned utilities allow an attacker to access specific areas within the system memory and write arbitrary code or content to the System Management RAM (SMRAM) to gain control over critical flash operations. Any attacker exploiting them with remote or local administrative privileges can run malicious code in SMM, bypassing all OS-level protections.
This can further allow hackers to disable UEFI security systems, including Secure Boot, and deploy firmware backdoors that can gain persistent access to the targeted system. These backdoors are also extremely hard to detect and impossible for OS-level security solutions to stop. Firmware updates patching the issues have already been released, and users are recommended to install them as soon as possible.
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