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The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

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Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#301
post #215

So. What now. Any consequences? I mean, will this trigger big changes, like some production moving somewhere else?

>like some production moving somewhere else?

Sure, to US, UK, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, because we trust these countries not to backdoor software and hardware.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#302

China is not a friend to the US alone, many countries hate them for their unethical practices

The more I speak to scientist and engineers from sub-Saharan Africa, the more hate I hear for China. It’s hard to comprehend.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#303
post #280
post #74

I have worked in card payment industry. We would be getting products from China with added boards to beam credit card information. This wasn't state-sponsored attack. Devices were modified while on production line (most likely by bribed employees) as once they were closed they would have anti-tampering mechanism activated so that later it would not be possible to open the device without setting the tamper flag. Once…

> We could not measure all possible angular momentums but it was possible to measure one or two that would not be known to the attacker. You mean moment of inertia, not angular momentum. You could measure all of them! Given the moments for the three principal axes at any point, you can use the parallel axis theorem to calculate all the rest. In general, there are 10 degrees of freedom: 3 for the position of the cente…

Ah, you are right. English is not my native language.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#304
I don't know which is more disturbing here.

That the Chinese military is technically competent enough to pull off such a thing.

Or that they are incompetent enough, to not secure their own back doors and networks, and allowed the FBI, NSA, and other American government organizations, the ability to counter-hack them, and monitor all their internal communications.

The truth is somewhere in between.

So, this article is basically saying: China got clever, and spied on us. We spied back on them, and we also hacked all of their internal communications too, so basically, we own them.

Well, at least America is finally admitting, that they too, actively spy on other countries. And can easily infiltrate any other country that they want.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#305
This seems either incredibly suspicious to me or indicates that Apple is way more protective of security and distrustful of the USGov than I would have thought: “Because Apple didn’t, according to a U.S. official, provide government investigators with access to its facilities or the tampered hardware, the extent of the attack there remained outside their view.”

Why wouldn’t the FBI be able to compel Apple to turn over such key evidence in such an important investigation? Or why wouldn't Apple be willing to do it even without compulsion?

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#306
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chinese government is probably not interested enough in credit card numbers to warrant involvement.

It would be foolish to show your hand for few pennies.

Might make a difference if those pennies can't be tracked back to the government.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#307

This seems either incredibly suspicious to me or indicates that Apple is way more protective of security and distrustful of the USGov than I would have thought: “Because Apple didn’t, according to a U.S. official, provide government investigators with access to its facilities or the tampered hardware, the extent of the attack there remained outside their view.” Why wouldn’t the FBI be able to compel Apple to turn ove…

Apple seems cagey about its reputation with the Chinese government. Their balls are directly in the Chinese government's hands, they don't want to do anything that might make the government upset.

Beyond having their manufacturing there, it's also the biggest untapped market in the world.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#308
And this is one of the major reasons why I support that the US is going after China.

It's a disgrace that previous politicians from both the EU and the US have just let China steal from the west through technology transfer and not actually enforcing IP.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#310

I am sincerly impressed by the amount of supply chain analysis and operative supply chain management that went into that hack. And once the Chinese identified a distribution node in that particular supply chain, supermicro, they opted for a brute force attack by seeding these backdoor chips into supermicros servers and wating where they ended up. That was one hell of a hack. It also gives you pause. Did that happen o…

Im impressed as well. But I'm sure its not as impressive as what the NSA is capable of. If you're reading an article about this - its because the US government wants you to know about it. The US has been doing this kind of stuff well before the Chinese or anyone else... And yes, totally agree that this is probably fairly common place. Some comments have shown that this happens with run-of-the-mill hardware like credit card scanners.

This stuff also reminds me of the Snowden revelations of hard-disk firmware hacking. Very similar conceptually to what is described in this article - albeit without custom hardware.

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