Posted on 10/17/2019 2:37:01 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
But that’s what we’re talking about here. The Chinese spies have no way of knowing if any one particular server is going to wind up in a sensitive, important location that could yield data ore for mining, so they’d have to insert their exploit in large numbers so they’re guaranteed a hit. Stuff such as you’re mentioning is of no consequence for their purpose. They want to hit the server that winds up in a critical gateway location. . . to do that, getting compromised chips into as many as possible increases the odds a compromised one winds up where they need it. The more the merrier.
If they know which one it is, they could do a Mission Impossible targeted install like described in this article, after all the QAs, but that’s unlikely. General, servers are generic, interchangeable devices, so how do you pick the right one going to the desired location to specifically compromise? You don’t, not at manufacture or assembly. It’s simply not economical to do and very likely to be found.
One of my original points for the original Bloomberg hoax article . . . especially true for multiple layer boards where you can’t just drill holes and plonk your IC Willy-nilly any old place there might be space to fit it. . . which is what it appears they did on this board from seven years ago.
He did say he used a microscope. . . LOL!
Of course, I was seeing preproduction boards.
When I disassembled production models that had junction connections, I knew that the product would have client issues.
This ain't the 80’s anymore with two and four layer boards, that even I could hack and bypass some limitation.
I would think within the chip sets, it wouldn’t be that difficult in place sleeper embedded systems, never used till activated, and nobody would be the wiser.
“wire in an additional PCB”
That is not what the article says. It says a surface mount resistor can be replaced with a chip about the same size. Jumper wires are used to wire up the chip, so it would be an obvious hack of the board. But they are not attaching an additional PCB.
Exactly, it takes a computer to design the circuit pathway on these multilayer boards and adding a single component can force changes in the positions of other components.
I recall the instructions for some of the add-on boards that were sold back in the ‘80s: "After being certain you have grounded yourself to the chassis, if you have a Revision A computer board, clip wire B to Leg 4 of the IC chip in the lower left corner of your circuit board as shown in fig. 1; otherwise, if you have a Revision B computer board, clip wire B to Leg 5 of the IC chip next to the second blue capacitor in the middle of the circuit board as shown in fig. 2. If you have a Revision C or later computer board, or there is a wire soldered to either of those legs on either of these ICs, wire B is not required and should be secured so as to not touch anything on the circuit board."
Of course the instructions seldom told you how to determine whether your computer’s board was revision A, B, C or later, and you spent a good deal of time looking around to find the often hand-inked indicator of which it was. Ah, the good old days of the golden age of home computing.
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