Can a virus survive a format ?

>>60743898
Yes, as evident by you still having AIDS.

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8KB, 263x192px

>>60743924
Answer seriously.

>>60743898
Oh boy! You had better go read some of the stuff Edward Snowden dropped a few years ago. Prepare your anus.

>>60743898
Absolutely. Fimware, controllers on the motherboard, network.

Yes if lower-level firmware had been infected - e.g. BIOS, drive controller.

>>60743898
>Lenovo's shitty UEFI in the T440

>>60743898
install gentoo

>>60743898
The spookiest persistence method I've seen is a rubber ducky on a USB mouse.

>>60743898
>>60743941

two types can

MBR rootkits, which hide in the first sector of the hard drive (some put info at the end of the drive in unused sectors, like TDL4 a few years ago). the MBR is the code that's used to pick the partition for booting and loads before reading any of the partitions. when you format, you recreate a file system on a partition, and it won't touch the MBR. good news: the MBR can be rewritten with ease (fixmbr, bootrec /fixmbr, boot0cfg -B adaX, grub-install /dev/sdX, etc...)

the second type infects firmware (BIOS, hard drive controller, network controller). those will survive format, rewriting MBR, even overwriting all sectors of the drives with zeroes or random bytes. they should theoretically be eradicable by flashing said firmware. I don't think many tools exist to detect them however.

>>60743898
boot sector viruses from the DOS age could, like stoned.

Maybe if you got some NSA tier firmware malware crap installed

On the bright side, the NSA probably isn't going to steal your nudes unless you're a terrorist

The ones that can are rare, but they do exist.