It looks like you may want to be really careful who gets to touch your PC as they could give it something that will never be cured, even if it goes into remission.  According to the article on Slashdot, the only prevention is to ensure that no one has exclusive unprotected interaction with your PC, otherwise you might find a little something in your BIOS that keeps coming back.  Since the actual infection resides in the BIOS, a compromised machine has no defence, and the ability to survive flashing makes this rather worrisome, especially if someone can manage to put it in a root kit.

“A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform unveil a BIOS level malware attack capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe. Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies — used the stage at last week’s CanSecWest conference to demonstrate methods (PDF) for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and re-flashing attempts. The technique includes patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them complete control of the machine. The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player.”

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