Brain food for MSI engineers, malware in MSI hardware

Question

Good Morning Everyone,
This is for MSI engineers, I will be happy if you can sort out this problem or in any case this email will help you design your systems better in the future. Let me start by thanking MSI engineers for doing a great job, I love and enjoy the MSI products and services. Thanks for doing a great job. Now to the problem...
I have an old PC based on G31TM-P21 mother board. I have gifted it away to my friends/students and they came back to inform me that it does not work. It puzzled me and I used Wire Shark network analyser to find an IGMP protocol based beacon running over it. Now this poor PC is an ordinary desktop and was never intended to use protocols like IGMP that contacts ICANN, it is even more curious to find that firewall that comes free with Windows Vista actually will never block this IGMP protocol because VISTA does not expect home users to use IGMP protocol. Anyway, I reinstalled everything and in a couple of days the guys were back complaining that system no longer boots and this time I found out that system is in actually in halt state, the CPU fan is running and everything is fine but system just does not reach POST screen. I cleared CMOS and reached BIOS setup. I enabled the option to not to halt on any error in BIOS and viola the system was up and running in no time. I wish the troubled ended there but the guys came back after couple of weeks with the usual trouble that system dose not work. I cleared the CMOS and again reached the BIOS setup and disabled the USB controller and hey presto the system is online again although no USB hardware can be used over it. Enable the USB controller and bang everything goes down again.
This IGMP beacon seems to be platform independent because I had installed windows/linux on the system but it does not seem to go away even after formatting the hard drive and zeroing/clearing every sector. The beacon just gives away the identity of the system on web and then the malware writer finds out what I have done to fix the system and then he moves on to improve the malware.
All right, MSI guys can always point and tell me that TPM module option was there and it would have avoided this malware attack on motherboard.
Now, I love the MSI idea of taking the back up of BIOS but I wish they can give a similar kind of option for firmware also.
I personally believe the system is toasted but any update to fix this trouble will be great.
I "guess" malware author has reprogrammed the south bridge of the motherboard because thats where the USB controller is located. I wonder why the option of reprogramming ASICs is there on the motherboard. I wish there was some kind of jumper to make these chips read only and stop these kind of destructive online attacks.
That was long email, if you made it to the end then thanks a lot for your time and patience. Have some coffee and have a great day.
Ciao,
protob
PS: The TOSHIBA (Linux) and Sony (VISTA) laptops that I am using right now seems to have caught the same malware. This is MSIs great opportunity to improve the hardware+marketing and take over the market. :-)

Answer 1

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This is for MSI engineers
then this is the wrong place as this is a Users-to-Users Forum. >>How to contact MSI.<<