MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise
T1542

Pre-OS Boot

Description

Adversaries may abuse Pre-OS Boot mechanisms as a way to establish persistence on a system. During the booting process of a computer, firmware and various startup services are loaded before the operating system. These programs control flow of execution before the operating system takes control.(Citation: Wikipedia Booting) Adversaries may overwrite data in boot drivers or firmware such as BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) and The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) to persist on systems at a layer below the operating system. This can be particularly difficult to detect as malware at this level will not be detected by host software-based defenses.

Mapped SPARTA techniques

6 techniques

Cite as SafeMode Space, mitre-attack-enterprise T1542.

Built 2026-07-25 from 216 techniques, 334 regulation articles, 125 ENISA controls, 2,610 framework controls, and 90 countermeasures.