So, how can you protect yourself? Well, there’s honestly not a whole lot you can do, other than make sure you don’t have any sort of malware on your operating system whatsoever. There are a whole host of viruses and exploits that can be used to install the firmware exploit in “a matter of seconds,” Goodspeed said.
The best you can do is encrypt your data “at rest” on your hard drive—as in, encrypt everything that’s on your hard drive. And hardware-based encryption, the most popular way to protect files, isn’t even safe. The hacked firmware can be programmed to grab data before it’s encrypted.
“The hard disk will encrypt and decrypt data for the backdoor,” the team wrote.
So, you can use slower, software-based encryption, or, you could just smash all of your hard drives to hell and go live in a cabin in the woods.