Experts at cybersecurity firm CyberCX unintentionally put themselves in this exact situation. Old Lenovo L440 laptops the company used in the past had their BIOS “conveniently locked” once the devices were decommissioned. The experts decided to use the computers as test subjects to learn how to break through BIOS passwords.
While the initial thought was to remove the CMOS battery, in recent years, manufacturers have begun keeping BIOS passwords on non-volatile storage, meaning a reset would do nothing. The experts then decided to target a specific chip on the motherboard, the Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) chip. Bypassing this module could result in skipping the password prompt entirely.
