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The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies (Bloomberg)

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Ghost_MH

Ghost_MH

Posted
Posted
56 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Bring back motherboard manufacturing to the US so American workers with tiny hands can do their work!

 

But seriously, this is very scary. Was Supermicro aware of this? How couldn't they be if it was on every board?

 

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If the boards met their stores during QA, why would they know? Sounds like everything worked as designed and intended...up until the small chip kicked in and tried to do something. I imagine that in behavioral analytics, this would be hard to pin down if you're seeing suspicious traffic going over your network with no clear origin.

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CitizenVectron

CitizenVectron

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42 minutes ago, mclumber1 said:

Could something like this cripple US infrastructure, transportation, and communication in the event of a (cyber) war?

 

One to three nukes in high orbit could theoretically wipe out the entire US electrical grid (permanently) so you don't really need something this complex for that large of an effect.

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CayceG

CayceG

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19 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

One to three nukes in high orbit could theoretically wipe out the entire US electrical grid (permanently) so you don't really need something this complex for that large of an effect.

 

Wrong.

 

 

Just. Fucking. Wrong. 

 

 

Everyone should stop it with this goddamn EMP bullshit fearmongering. This is not how EMPs work. The electrical grid would not respond that way (just like it didn't respond that way during Starfish Prime). 

 

I call upon Wade to put the next person that mentions EMPs in line for the :guillotine:

 

 

EDIT:

Also, if anyone detonates a nuclear fucking warhead--let alone THREE--in the atmosphere above a country, we will all have much bigger problems than electrical issues. That is to say, about 5 minutes before the detonations, we will have launched a retaliatory response in the direction of the incoming missiles. And then everyone is fucked. 

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TwinIon

TwinIon

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I'm still not sure what to think about this. On the one hand, this seems like a very carefully reported story by Bloomberg. They obviously worked on it for a long time, and they had the strong denials of these companies in hand before publication, but decided to stand by their reporters. At first blush there is no particular reason not to believe the story as reported.

 

And what a report it is. If true, the true scrope of these hardware hacks seem to be largely unknown, but it's obviously massive. It may well eclipse STUXNET as the most complex and impressive hack of all time.

 

On the other hand, the pushback and the denials have been so forceful, it does beg the question as to if the whole thing is real or not. As Ars points out, there is a clear difference between Apple's denials here, and their statement about PRISM. Those statements were carefully worded to deny the technical language of some allegations, which were largely true. With these denials, Apple is leaving no wiggle room. These are the kind of denials that could get them sued by shareholders if they're lying. Same with Amazon. We also haven't seen any corroborating

reporting thus far.

 

Either the FBI is doing an incredible job at keeping the extent of the hacks so hidden that these companies don't actually know about it, the FBI is making them lie about it, or some of these companies really weren't affected. Of those, the last seems the most plausible. Maybe the hack happened, but it's far less pervasive than Bloomberg thinks? Whatever the case, it's such a massive issue that I have to imagine we'll hear more about it in the coming weeks or months. If it is real, I would expect one of these servers to pop up in the wild eventually.

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Remarkableriots

Remarkableriots

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On 10/4/2018 at 1:49 PM, CayceG said:

 

Wrong.

 

 

Just. Fucking. Wrong. 

 

 

Everyone should stop it with this goddamn EMP bullshit fearmongering. This is not how EMPs work. The electrical grid would not respond that way (just like it didn't respond that way during Starfish Prime). 

 

I call upon Wade to put the next person that mentions EMPs in line for the :guillotine:

 

 

EDIT:

Also, if anyone detonates a nuclear fucking warhead--let alone THREE--in the atmosphere above a country, we will all have much bigger problems than electrical issues. That is to say, about 5 minutes before the detonations, we will have launched a retaliatory response in the direction of the incoming missiles. And then everyone is fucked. 

Quote

In testimony before the United States Congress House Armed Services Committee on October 7, 1999, the eminent physicist Dr. Lowell Wood, in talking about Starfish Prime and the related EMP-producing nuclear tests in 1962, stated,

"Most fortunately, these tests took place over Johnston Island in the mid-Pacific rather than the Nevada Test Site, or electromagnetic pulse would still be indelibly imprinted in the minds of the citizenry of the western U.S., as well as in the history books.   As it was, significant damage was done to both civilian and military electrical systems throughout the Hawaiian Islands, over 800 miles away from ground zero.  The origin and nature of this damage was successfully obscured at the time -- aided by its mysterious character and the essentially incredible truth."

http://futurescience.com/emp.html

 

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Remarkableriots

Remarkableriots

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Quote

At a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on October 12th, experts warned that the greatest existential threat to the country may come from the detonation of a nuclear EMP bomb. It could kill as many as 90 percent of all Americans within a year.

What would an EMP attack actually do? It could involve the detonation of a hydrogen bomb delivered by missile or even satellites at a high altitude of 30-400 km, creating an electromagnetic pulse that would knock out the electrical grid. But not only that - all electrical devices in the range of the blast could be fried. No lights, no computers, no phones, no internet, not even cars would work. The lack of refrigeration is likely to spoil food, causing mass starvation. Add to that lack of clean water, no air traffic control or any financial transactions taking place and you have widespread devastation in the U.S.

The casualties incurred would not be from the explosion, as it can happen too high for its nuclear effects to be felt strongly on the ground. But the loss of life-sustaining infrastructure could bring slow but sure disaster.

 

This kind of doomsday prediction comes courtesy of two members of the former congressional EMP commission - Dr. William R. Graham and Dr. Peter Vincent Pry. Dr. Graham is a physicist who was a science advisor to President Reagan and administrated NASA. Dr. Pry is a former CIA officer responsible for analyzing Soviet and Russian nuclear strategy, who has served on numerous congressional boards related to security. 

They appealed for President Trump to prepare the country’s infrastructure for an EMP attack via a number of possible steps while lambasting the U.S intelligence apparatus for ignoring warning signs and constantly underestimating North Korean capabilities.

https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/congress-warned-this-new-weapon-from-north-korea-could-kill-up-to-90-percent-of-americans

 

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CayceG

CayceG

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@Remarkableriots

 

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/24/the-empire-strikes-back/

 

Direct refutation:

 

Quote

The most famous event was called Starfish Prime — a 1.4 megaton nuclear explosion conducted by the United States in the Pacific in July 1962. By contrast, North Korea’s 2013 nuclear test — its largest and most successful — was on the order of 10 kilotons, or more than a hundred-times smaller.

 

EMP threat-mongers sometimes dramatically exaggerate the effects of Starfish Prime. For example, Lowell Wood, later a member of the EMP Commission, described the impact of Starfish Prime to Congress in plainly apocalyptic terms. Starfish Prime, he said, "very unexpectedly turned off the lights over a few million square miles in the mid-Pacific. This EMP also shut down radio stations, turned off cars, burned out telephone systems, and wreaked other mischief throughout the Hawaiian Islands, nearly 1,000 miles distant from ground zero."

 

All of which was terrible — or would have been, had it happened. It did not.

 

Starfish Prime was bad, but it was not nearly so dramatic as Wood claimed. In fact, lots of people turned out to watch the explosion from hotels and beaches in Hawaii, including reporters sent to cover it.

 

Quote

Now, as I say, Starfish Prime did do some damage, even if Waikiki’s luau schedule was uninterrupted. The electromagnetic pulse and other effects probably killed off two or three satellites in orbit, which was bad enough. The explosion may also have damaged some telephone equipment, but there were no telephone outages. (Military communications and test instrumentation all worked fine.) Some street lights on Ferdinand Street in Manoa and Kawainui Street in Kailua also went out. Of course, street lights and telephone systems experience everyday failures, too. You’d be surprised at how hard it is to demonstrate that street light failures are the result of an electromagnetic pulse rather than, say, faulty fuses. (Apparently, the answer turns on fascinating questions like "How many clear plastic washers were in transformer cutouts that failed?") Contemporary reports mention continuous radio coverage of the event with no outages.

 

So let’s be clear: Starfish Prime did not turn off the lights over a few million square miles in the mid-Pacific." It did not shut down any radio stations or cars or burn out the telephone system. 

 

Quote

For example, the EMP Commission exposed 37 cars and 18 trucks to EMP effects in a laboratory environment. While EMP advocates claim the results of an EMP attack would be "planes falling from the sky, cars stalling on the roadways, electrical networks failing, food rotting," the actual results were much more modest. Of the 55 vehicles exposed to EMP, six at the highest levels of exposure needed to be restarted. A few more showed "nuisance" damage to electronics, such as blinking dashboard displays.

 

 

Regarding the people on the EMP Commission, they theoretically want to stop nuclear detonations in space, right?

 

Wrong:

 

Quote

Lest you think these ideas collapsed with the Soviet Union, EMP Commission members William Graham, Johnny Foster, and Robert Hermann were all members of the Defense Science Board when it made an ill-fated effort to revive nuclear-armed missile defenses in the Bush administration. The George W. Bush administration. This led Senators Ted Stevens and Dianne Feinstein to sponsor an amendment that prohibits any expenditure on such a cockamamie scheme. Stevens called the idea "stupid," which would be the first and last time that the late senator from Alaska and I agreed completely.

One might very well get the impression from all this that certain people are perhaps not quite as worried about electromagnetic pulse as they let on, at least not when it threatens sacred causes like national missile defense efforts.

 

 

So, again, I say: Wrong. Fucking wrong on each and every count. 

 

EMPs are not a threat. 

 

Nuclear weapons are a threat. Period.

 

 

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