Posted on 10/06/2018 7:22:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Bloomberg/Business Week this morning broke the most disturbing spy story in years: Chinese cyber-spies embedded a secret back door onto computer motherboards intended for super-secret CIA cloud computing. The techies at Amazon Web Services discovered one particular back door in hardware built by Chinese subcontractors for Supermicro of San Jose, California, one of the world's biggest suppliers of motherboards.
Bloomberg reports:
One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the worlds mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs.
Let that sink in: the U.S. Department of Defense uses Chinese computer components because they are NOT manufactured in the United States of America. U.S. counterintelligence found one back door. We have no idea how many more back doors are out here.
The level of technological skill required for this sort of "seeding" attack is impressive, according to Bloomberg. This isn't like planting a microphone in a flower pot:
To actually accomplish a seeding attack would mean developing deep understanding of a products design, manipulating components at the factory, and ensuring that the doctored devices made it through the global logistics chain to the desired location -- a feat akin to throwing a stick in the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai and ensuring that it washes ashore in Seattle.
Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow, says Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and the founder of Grand Idea Studio Inc. Hardware is just so far off the radar, its almost treated like black magic. But thats just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the Peoples Liberation Army.
It's been obvious for years that the United States needs to bring high-tech manufacturing onshore for national security reasons -- whatever the economic consequences. The Pentagon procurement system favors the bottom line of an oligopoly of defense contractors. Chinese hardware is cheaper and the globalized supply chain has been a bonanza for the defense industry. The Pentagon's hardware requirements, moreover, are a tiny fraction of the American market. Building chip foundries in the U.S. for national security reasons will cost a lot more.
But math is hard. Gender studies is much easier.
How much of this crap is embedded in guidance systems and our fly by wire systems that are integral to the performance of our top military aircraft. I don’t want to the first pilot, when the shooting starts, to find out my Chinese opponent can send my plane into the dirt or turn off my weapon systems with a flick of a switch. Can they take control of our drones? We did gift one to the Iranians, thank you Barry.
Yep, shipping all our computer and smart phone building to china for the cheap slave like labor sure has paid off. It’s made lots of millionaires and billionaires out in silly-con valley.
Exactly. Who needs to study these hard things when the Chinese will do it for us? It’s way more important to have young people who are “socially conscious.” The ones who can yell and scream and disrupt our government institutions. Now, that’s what really matters.
Are we screwed up or what?
“The level of technological skill required for this sort of “seeding” attack is impressive, according to Bloomberg.”
While in the US, the level of general technical oversight in government is appallingly juvenile.
“Are we screwed up or what?”
We certainly are.
I’ve often said that in this age of Postmodernism, rejection of reality, accepting of mental disorders as normal... the country or society most grounded in reality and sanity will come out on top.
Right now China and Russia are two such countries - neither has fallen prey to the sick and debilitating insanity of Postmodernism that we in the West have
We better find a way to escape its clutches soon or reality will surely and rightly get its revenge on us.
Remind me again, what's their disease?
Sue the jumpin-jehoshaphat out of Supermicro.
Give Amazon a piece of the $recovered. (like they need it, but it sets an example)
Trump must realize that China is NOT a friend of the US.
Intel computer chip creator has already installed a parallel management override circuit in ALL Intel chips.
The NSA has your data on any connected computer you own.
Keep one private computer 100% OFFLINE. That is how Defense companies do it.
Protect your data.
Apple official statement: What Bloomberg Businessweek got wrong about Apple.
Ping.
So is Amazon plus Bloomberg's story is full of holes with anonymous sources being quoted about it all. . . and it supposedly was discovered by both Amazon and Apple in the summer of 2015, THREE YEARS AGO, yet no security alerts were published anywhere? Not believable. Single source, anonymous citations, and denials from those most involved with the situation and the historic facts at the time don't comport with the story line. It smells to high heaven of FAKE NEWS.
Thanks for that link. I agree with you. High probability this is fake news.
I have been worried about all you identified and our sips and subs and cars, trucks, trains ... everything we use, for decades. Lets not forget EMPs. We are way too dependent upon computers.
Apple and Amazon can strongly deny it all the want.
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333839
The craze is now officially off the chain.
The entire electronics space is buzzing for the seismic implications of this. The damage this is going to do to China in the mid to long term is going to be massive.
Talk has spread to routers, of all sizes - industrial to household.
The sources for the Bloomberg article were government and military.
This revelation could be the neutron bomb, the EMP of this trade conflict with China - nobody is going to buy from you because nobody trusts you, period.
The electronics business, for China, is everything. This may actually for the Chinese government to disavow this activity by groups within the PLA as rebellious, and force the Chinese into removing non-tariff barriers to business in China.
They overstepped in a major way here. Our entire position is they’ve taken advantage of the world, especially in IP confiscation. This hardware hack, its scope, and the arrogance of it - them using it as a way to turn the entire world into an idea factory for their eventual world domination. There is no other way to look at this.
This is check and mate. This may collapse China. They just injected 174 billion today. It’s an astounding number. When we nationalized the big nine bangs in 2008, we spent 250 billion, and did that in massive extremis.
Going to be an active news week.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.