Thousands of servers can be backdoored by exploiting buggy motherboard controllers

Baseboard management controllers are miniature computers that are embedded into the motherboards of virtually every enterprise server. The microcontrollers, typically abbreviated as BMCs, run with their own operating system firmware, network stack, and IP address. Administrators rely on them to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers and to perform a variety of tasks, including rebooting machines, installing updates, and even reinstalling operating systems. BMCs provide what’s known as “lights out” and “out-of-band” management because they work even when servers they’re attached to are turned off or are unresponsive.

Hmm. I don’t really understand what the major benefit is to having an integrated management system over just providing a BIOS that can expose its interface on a serial port and having a serial device server attached to the thing, which then means that you aren’t tied to a particular management system. I’d also kinda think that it’d be cheaper to use a serial device server if you have a ton of servers in a rack that need to be managed, since one serial port server can handle all of them. Use a smart PMU for power control.

Maybe interfaces are more standardized or something, for automated tasks?