Apple Security Ping!
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Posted on 10/04/2018 8:46:18 AM PDT by Para-Ord.45
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.
There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies
...and Feinstein's limo.
Aren’t we such a cute, hug and touch country — letting our sworn enemies furnish our most crucial high tech components. In fact, I bet the Chinese felt so warm about it they forgot to implant back door spy technology.
People would be surprised at how much vital parts of our economy have been farmed out to the Chinese.
But the Chinese are trustworthy, of course, and it is racism to think otherwise. It just the millions of its own citizens they have murdered, but they love us, and would not dare try to harm us.
Imagine what Brennan, Comey and Strzok (US head of Counter-espionage) might have been able to do if instead of trying to overthrow Donald Trump and banging their colleagues, actually did their jobs?
This has tremendous implications for the defense establishment.... think a back door into aircraft/drone/ship avionics, armor and battlefield management, and who knows what else. Not to mention all kinds of domestic infrastructure. One more reason to bring critical manufacturing home.
I’m in the printed circuit board manufacturing industry.
The impact this is going to have on China can’t be understated. The USG now has the ability to ban ANY device manufactured either by a US company using Chinese subcontractors, or a Chinese company under ANY circumstances.
How did this happen? Designed in at the board level by the Chinese. It’s that simple. Can a board designed by a US company end up with a chip in it like this?
Much harder to do. Most boards are functionally tested at the board level to determine if everything works - voltage output levels correct, duty cycle, etc.
Is anybody going to ever hand their board data to a Chinese sub ever again? Don’t know. Generally, you send the ‘Gerber’ data, a bill of materials (BOM, the parts that are soldered on the board), a netlist (literally, a list of all the separate circuits), and a test spec, sometimes multiple test specs (in-circuit test, functional, chip programming).
Elemental is owned by AWS. Apple appears to have known there was an issue like this as far back as 2015, and in 2014 it appears the feds knew.
The new question regards AWS - what did they know, and when did they know it? I’ll bet the reptile Zuckerberg is having a pretty good day today. The heat on Bezos is going to be considerable.
Wonder what it would cost in total, logistically , for the DoD to simply manufactured their own electronics.
Or, the cost for Apple to move to say, Philippines or Taiwan.
Think Mexico, not Asia.
I think the reason we reached a deal with Mexico as quickly as we did was the intimation that a LOT more pcb business is coming Mexico’s way.
We are seeing it already. Equipment orders out of Mexico are going up sharply. Our market tends to serve automotive, but geographically consolidating the electronics market in the USA is massive.
This is going to also have a massive impact on Chinese nationals access to our University system. EB-5 program is likely going to either be sharply curtailed or shut down all together.
China is going to run out of money in a public, impossible to hide way in a matter of probably 60 days.
This Bloomberg article is the nuke being dropped in the Chinese trade war. It’s essentially over in my opinion.
informative post. thanks.
This may explain what caused the blackouts on our Navy ships that were purposely rammed.
SS1
I have been complaining about this stupidity for 50 years. Our President might see us from this insanity but it won't be easy. We should never be dependent on any Country for things vital to our security. Toys, sure, Tanks and Airplanes no.
...and Feinstein's limo.
Too bad the chip's weren't designed to butter all of us up... nothing easier than an old fool like Feinstein.
Think of all the companies who have partnered with Huawei for example. I would never buy a Chinese router.
Wouldn’t`t touch Huawei with a 10 foot pole:
U.S. intelligence officials question Canada’s ability to test China’s Huawei for security breaches
Mr. Paul-Hus said he asked the U.S. officials whether they agreed with Scott Jones, the head of Ottawa’s Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, who in testimony to a Commons Committee on Sept. 20 dismissed the need to follow the United States’ and Australia’s lead in barring Huawei from playing any role in the telecom networks that will connect the next generation of smartphones.
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If true, good for Apple to avoid this spying problem embedded in other company servers. It is so convenient to have your data in the cloud and access it from multiple devices in different places. As long as you're willing to risk the scenario that others can intercept your data. Not a problem for many of us, but still something to worry about. It amazes me how quickly I can manipulate my spreadsheet data in the cloud, when decades ago it took forever to download a megabyte of data. Different world now.
Apple certainly is in a position to do this, and I certainly want to believe that they did - so I think I will.I’m more worried about someone inserting unwanted logic inside a chip. Seems like in principle that could be hard to detect via testing.
True, hard to detect. Before I retired, I worked as an IT senior systems engineer. Several decades ago, I wrote custom machine code for IBM mainframes I maintained at my job that controlled the flow of thousands of programs that ran. I secretly embedded code that gave my programs top priority over everything else running. Many years after I left that department, my code was still running and no one detected it (despite a dozen other engineers working on the systems code). And no one would unless specifically testing with the trigger code I used to enable it. Lots of programmers did this sort of stuff for fun, because they could - nothing malicious.
It's different now, with governments doing it for malicious reasons.
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