Move over phishing - it looks as though there's a new form of malware on the block. Called phlashing it was demonstrated in London today according to news site The Register. It works by abusing the firmware update utilties of systems that have them, which is going to be just about everything.

These elements of a system are frequently unpatched so phlashing them would of course cause permanent damage.

For the moment this is a theoretical threat - it's been developed and demonstrated by HP but nobody's saying it happens in the wild. Nasty thought, all the same.