With the litany of free trial programs, adware, and other unwanted “features” that come with the factory images of Windows computers, it has become standard procedure for many users to wipe the system drive of a new PC and install Windows from the Microsoft-published media. However, these attempts by the user to have a clean installation are turning out to be less secure than they should be.
Windows 8 introduced a feature called Windows Binary Platform Table (WBPT), which allows OEMs to insert small executables into the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI); these executables are copied into the file system and executed by Windows. There is no way to prevent this behavior in Windows using the Group Policy Editor or other obvious system management tools.
