Planting Tiny Spy Chips in Hardware Can Cost as Little as $200

JacksinPA said:

Planting Tiny Spy Chips in Hardware Can Cost as Little as $200 | WIRED

A new proof-of-concept hardware implant shows how easy it may be to hide malicious chips inside IT equipment.

More than a year has passed since Bloomberg Businessweek grabbed the lapels of the cybersecurity world with a bombshell claim: that Supermicro motherboards in servers used by major tech firms, including Apple and Amazon, had been stealthily implanted with a chip the size of a rice grain that allowed Chinese hackers to spy deep into those networks. Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all vehemently denied the report. The NSA dismissed it as a false alarm. The Defcon hacker conference awarded it two Pwnie Awards, for "most overhyped bug" and "most epic fail." And no follow-up reporting has yet affirmed its central premise.

But even as the facts of that story remain unconfirmed, the security community has warned that the possibility of the supply chain attacks it describes is all too real. The NSA, after all, has been doing something like it for years, according to the leaks of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Now researchers have gone further, showing just how easily and cheaply a tiny, tough-to-detect spy chip could be planted in a company's hardware supply chain. And one of them has demonstrated that it doesn't even require a state-sponsored spy agency to pull it off—just a motivated hardware hacker with the right access and as little as $200 worth of equipment.
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Just when you had convinced yourself that you are not paranoid, evil doers may have bugged everything containing a microprocessor that you own or use. This goes from video doorbells to voice-activated thingies from Amazon & smart phones that many people are obsessed with.

Click to expand...

JacksinPA said:

Planting Tiny Spy Chips in Hardware Can Cost as Little as $200 | WIRED

A new proof-of-concept hardware implant shows how easy it may be to hide malicious chips inside IT equipment.

More than a year has passed since Bloomberg Businessweek grabbed the lapels of the cybersecurity world with a bombshell claim: that Supermicro motherboards in servers used by major tech firms, including Apple and Amazon, had been stealthily implanted with a chip the size of a rice grain that allowed Chinese hackers to spy deep into those networks. Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all vehemently denied the report. The NSA dismissed it as a false alarm. The Defcon hacker conference awarded it two Pwnie Awards, for "most overhyped bug" and "most epic fail." And no follow-up reporting has yet affirmed its central premise.

But even as the facts of that story remain unconfirmed, the security community has warned that the possibility of the supply chain attacks it describes is all too real. The NSA, after all, has been doing something like it for years, according to the leaks of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Now researchers have gone further, showing just how easily and cheaply a tiny, tough-to-detect spy chip could be planted in a company's hardware supply chain. And one of them has demonstrated that it doesn't even require a state-sponsored spy agency to pull it off—just a motivated hardware hacker with the right access and as little as $200 worth of equipment.
=================================================
Just when you had convinced yourself that you are not paranoid, evil doers may have bugged everything containing a microprocessor that you own or use. This goes from video doorbells to voice-activated thingies from Amazon & smart phones that many people are obsessed with.

Click to expand...

longview said:

This is not all that new, high security facilities have barred equipment like Lenovo, and almost all cell phones for several years.
I think I first heard about it in 2011.

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