Dell Technologies Inc. today introduced a new firmware scanning technology, along with a more accommodating licensing scheme for its encryption suite, to help enterprises protect the personal computers of employees who have switched to remote working. 

SafeBIOS Events & IoA is an upgrade to the SafeBIOS software that Dell ships with its business-grade PCs. As the name suggests, it’s designed to protect the BIOS, the low-level firmware that helps load the operating system when a user turns on their computer.

The BIOS is an attractive target for hackers because it can be abused to access the Windows installation on a machine and the user’s data. Moreover, once one computer on the corporate network is compromised, there’s always the risk that the attacker will try to use it as a beachhead from which to target other internal systems.

Dell claims that SafeBIOS Events & IoA can help companies catch such breaches faster. The technology uses “behavior-based threat detection” techniques to identify BIOS tempering and, when it spots an attempt to make a malicious change, sends an alert to administrations. David Konetski, a vice president at Dell, told CRN that the company believes it’s the only computer maker offering the capability to detect such modifications in real time as they occur.

“When BIOS configuration changes are detected that indicate a potential attack, security and IT teams are quickly alerted in their management consoles, allowing for swift isolation and remediation,” Konetski elaborated in a blog post. “Detection at this level allows organizations to respond to advanced threats quickly and successfully, interrupting the attack chain before it’s able to do more damage.”

Dell is making SafeBIOS Events & IoA available for free on its business-grade PCs. The supported product families include the Latitude, OptiPlex, Precision and XPS computer lines.

The company is also introducing the option to buy temporary licenses to Dell Encryption through May 15 in a bid to make the offering more accessible to businesses. Dell Encryption is a suite of security applications that companies can use to apply cryptographic protection to employees’ hard drives, as well as any external storage device they attach to their machines. 

Most of Dell’s enterprise PCs ship with Windows, but not all. The company last year partnered with Google on its push to bring Chrome OS to the enterprise by launching a pair of business-grade Chromebooks. The machines use Google’s Titan security chip to check their BIOS and local Chrome OS copy for tempering at every boot.

Image: Dell