[jenniferk]

>One BIOS attack, called SWAP, was developed by the NSA to attack a number of types of computers and operating systems by loading surveillance and control software at boot-up. SWAP uses the Host Protected Area on a computer’s hard drive to store the payload and installs it before the operating system boots.

Won't the much maligned UEFI Secure Boot in Windows 8 stop this?

[MertsA]

Nope, SecureBoot is built into the BIOS not hardware so if you can rewrite the BIOS you can have it just load whatever payload off of the HPA sidestepping SecureBoot until it comes time to start the boot loader.