Thanks for the kind words. As you know, decent quality ethernet board connectors often come with emi/rfi filter chips, tiny bitty things either pre-installed on the connector daughter board, or inserted under it prior to its insertion. Apparantly china found a way to put in tiny microprocessors in there instead. Ruh-roh!
They could be programmed to wait awhile, sniff, report back...almost anything. Since they would be at the hardware layers (layers 1 and 2) of the 7 layer OSI model of ethernet, it would be extremely difficult to detect.
Physical inspection could get them, perhaps, but if they’re carefully disguised, good luck. Maybe a tiny height difference.
But done right, software wouldn’t detect them. Not even at the binary level, including firmware or anything.
Basically, it’s a built in, preprogrammed, “at will” sniffer. It could even add or change incoming packets. Or monitor every ISP the board connects to, save and rebroadcast in timed chunks to another ISP...etc.
It’s a computer in between. Perfect “man in the middle.”
And from what I’ve read, the CIA and NSA have things like that already.
Again, we have only a report from BLOOMBERG, a non-tech source using anonymous sources. . . which is all they use for these reports. They've been caught before citing anonymous sources for FAKE NEWS in tech. MULTIPLE TIMES.
This time they are been fed information from a company, Sepio Systems, a recent startup, whose entire business is selling software to mitigate against the installation of surreptitious chips on standard reference motherboards and other hardware. Sepio's co-CEO, Yossi Appleboum, is the fellow who has been advising Bloomberg's non-tech writers on these articles including the one on the Ethernet connector discovery, which he claims he found when he was "called in by a major telecom company" which he says he cannot name due to "it would violate his non-disclosure agreement", yet he proceeds to reveal everything else about why he was called in, what he found, where he found it, that it was on a Supermicro server motherboard, etc. just won't say WHICH "major telecom" company need the services of his startup security scanning to find that ONE SINGLE SERVER out of their thousands that had a mis-behaving Ethernet connector. (Other NAMED major telecoms that use Supermicro servers have AGAIN made official statements they have NOT found anything amiss with their servers, the ethernet connectors, or anything to cause them to think there was a problem, denying Bloomberg's claims, once again.)
And only one? Give me a break. If China were going to do this, they'd do it wholesale, to thousands of Ethernet connectors, not just one. How would they know their malicious spy Ethernet connector would wind up in a critical usage location to provide them with anything useful. Appleboum stated this one was in a streaming video server. Not much useful going through that connector. So they'd use a scatter gun approach, putting them in ALL motherboards, not just a one-off. I think if he found anything, it was just an aberrant malfunction. Only one out of thousands doesn't make sense. Logic says it's another Bloomberg FAKE NEWS FEAR article.
Frankly, that smells.