Who else found the design of the page made the article difficult to read? I know darkness, spies and hacking go hand-in-hand but it's a bit too much imho.
I lasted about 3 seconds before I toggled reader view.
The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
51–60 of 818 posts
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#52> The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have crashed or are turned off.
Obviously this would still be possible without IntelME, but having an always on, highly privileged and remotely accessible baseband definitely makes the modifications easier and smaller...
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#53>Supermicro subcontractor
There is only one I know of: Soyo motherboard
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#54>Amazon’s security team conducted its own investigation into AWS’s Beijing facilities and found altered motherboards there as well, including more sophisticated designs than they’d previously encountered. >...the malicious chips were thin enough that they’d been embedded between the layers of fiberglass onto which the other components were attached >...that generation of chips was smaller than a sharpened pencil tip,…
This sounds strange but it's commonplace to make parts like this. Some DCDC converter modules have silicon dies embedded into their PCBs to save physical footprint, most notably there's a family of Texas Instruments ones which use this technique.
https://www.electronicdesign.com/sites/electronicdesign.com/...
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#55Who else found the design of the page made the article difficult to read? I know darkness, spies and hacking go hand-in-hand but it's a bit too much imho.
I found it perfect on my OLED mobile screen.
OLED works better with darkness than with bright backgrounds.
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#56When will this stuff finally have consequences for China?
Their behavior, not their communication, has been overtly hostile for a while. Yet, very few politicians openly adress the issue.
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#57"Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not."
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#58> One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs.
Intel and AMD are both USA based companies.
Is it conceivable their processors contain backdoors in a similar vein?
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#59Is there an article that describes a bit more in detail what the chips actually did (or were capable of doing)? They only say "the microchip altered the operating system’s core so it could accept modifications.", which I might interpret as circumventing signature checks to allow installing modified firmware on the systems? But how does the chip connect to the network and how does it receive commands? That said, it's…
5. When a server was installed and switched on, the microchip altered the operating system’s core so it could accept modifications. The chip could also contact computers controlled by the attackers in search of further instructions and code. So, in typical vulnerability/payload/exploit fashion, the board's bus is vulnerable by default, because the chip pierces all the usual lines of defense protecting against network…
They didn't do anything to the CPU, what they did is the modchipped the line from EEPROM and the board management controller.
They probably found it out when they were repeatedly tried to reflash the BMC flash, and saw that checksums did not match.
Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've worked on systems deployed in the financial sector in high risk environments. This sort of monitoring doesn't happen in the real world.
Intrusion Detection Systems are basic network security 101 type stuff. I'd be surprised if anything that was really "high risk" didn't use an IDS.
There's a big difference between "using an IDS" and "a few unintended/unexpected packets are noticed and properly followed up on".