New Intel-Based PC’s Permanently Hackable

[dilby]

10. Thank you for the welcome, been lurking on the site for a couple weeks.

I use IPMI daily to manage servers so the ability to turn a server on remotely or check the health status on one that wont post or boot is necessary. A lot of hardware manufacturers charge a hefty licensing fee for this ability like HP and Dell, supermicro gives it away for free. But most servers have this built it, it's just an extra ethernet port on the back of the system that you need to have a cable plugged into, but you can pretty much do everything from it like accessing the BIOS remotely to accessing the OS. You can even install an OS by mounting an ISO image remotely. I would not worry too much about this, is it possible? Yes, but it's just as likely that it could be used to wake your system via your lan connection if you had port 623 open and forwarded to your PC on your router which most people wont do by default.