New Evidence of Hacked Supermicro Hardware Found in U.S. Telecom

It would not have to have more than two leads, depending on its use in the circuit. It was an example meant to illustrate how the dramatically different levels of miniaturization can make it hard to reason about attack vectors.

Consider what a state actor could do with access to modern microprocessor level fabrication.

I'd expect that we'd see features such as the following:

- sophisticated intra-chip communication

- long periods of total dormancy of the exploits

- circuitry capable of receiving a "it's safe to begin the attack" message

- surprising communications vectors for exfiltration

- technology to make malicious parts appear under x-ray to be normal

- fallback to awaiting the message to perform DoS if more sophisticated attack vectors are not possible

I agree with your suggestion about using the existing footprint, etc. There is likely some very sophisticated tech for making malicious parts x-ray and test as normal in every respect.

The network connector exploit described in the article would be easily detectable by temperature dissipation measurements. So distributed methodologies are likely in use.

I'd also estimate that a large number of mobile devices have built-in hardware compromises that are dormant and can be used if necessary. These would be the simplest attacks to carry out and would have extremely high yield. Things like:

- phones suddenly jamming the 4G and WiFi network simultaneously

- hardware implants to help detect whether a device is being used by a high value target. Such an attack could be created using a tiny bit of silicon and would be dormant in most cases.

The biggest risk to a state actor doing these kinds of attacks is being detected, so firmware based attacks are potentially more risky than hardware attacks, since we are better at detecting a checksum mismatch than we are at testing hardware across the spectrum of possible input conditions that might trigger unusual behavior.

So I think we'd see state actors dipping their toe in slowly to these kinds of attacks, first establishing the supply chain hacks without anything malicious going on, and then gradually phasing in actual malicious hardware once the relevant parameters for the attack are better understood.

Yes, it was made public at this time for a reason. I have no idea about who made it public and why, but you can be sure there is a bigger game here.

Did the journalist and/or their friends and family make money on the massive drop in Supermicro stock?

Is the Trump administration asking to push this information out to earn favor in the trade war?

Are the investigators stumped and using this in an attempt to flush out new leads?

No idea.

Whoever directly oversees it and acts as the stakeholder for GovCloud should be, sure, but there's no reason for the person above the direct overseer to be cleared. Otherwise by that logic Bezos should be cleared as well.

maybe its just me but this seems all too familiar. we've seen it happen with iraq, reputable media outputs sensational hostile state actions, immediately faces criticism, but more importantly the timing after announcing China tried meddling with elections.

i dont know sometimes i like reading into the big picture, what is the purpose of this bloomberg article for those outside HN? it won't invoke feelings of calm but rather moral panic. now half the americans are riled up to think china is attacking usa, and we remember they need just teh right amount of support.

also as the noose is tightening around trump, a war or a limited military conflict would be the perfect distraction.

/end conspiracy

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