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Sorta OT.... Virus problems may affect us

The US Government has publicly admitted doing just that at least once, to printers, but you're getting into the "I can neither confirm nor deny" zone. You could consider the fake broken-distillation-plant message from Midway an early example of planting a bug in the enemy's systems.

I remove all pre-installed software from new flash drives and check them with several up-to-date antivirus programs. Watch out for what executes when you play a DVD movie on your computer. PCFriendly is the known agent but there could easily be others using it's techniques. Process Explorer and Autoruns from Sysinternals are good monitoring tool for this, also HiJackThis and SpyBot to catch Registry changes. The main reason I back up my C: drive periodically (like yesterday) with Ghost or Acronis is so I can wipe and restore it if it gets infected. The faster PC with all the good stuff stays off line.

I've never worked on consumer-grade entertainment products, only avionics, industrial & medical equipment and the Segway, so I don't really know low-cost mass production practice.

In high-quality equipment, access to the firmware is blocked by a fuse link or password but the board or system test stations typically can unlock it and confirm the code, via Pogo pins on the JTAG port for instance. If there is a potential vulnerability it's the repair operation which has to be able to get into everything and load in emergency updates using their own custom fixture that Manufacturing may not understand or fully control. If I were an operative wanting to subvert a product I'd look for a company that outsources its field service repairs.

But yes, it's quite possible to add a backdoor. Unintentional defects certainly exist, I've found them in ICs that had been in production for years.

Reply to
Jim Wilkins
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So if a China, or or some other country that manufactures our chips had access to the chip manufacturing process of say..commercial grade servers, enterprize servers and so forth, its would be possible to remotely shut down, disable or worse yet, read data?

I know that there are a number of software progs that are alleged to have backdoors that can be exploited by the US government...shrug

Gunner

Reply to
Gunner Asch

Yes, but only once, and even then penetration is likely to be incomplete before detection, plus there is considerable physical isolation of the more critical networks. Like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 we can be surprised and seriously annoyed but they couldn't threaten to repeat it.

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Reply to
Jim Wilkins

I think that it is a very feasible scenario that the Chinese would put some trojan code into their devices such as network cards. Normally, operating system architecture prevents a network card from taking over the computer, but who knows., maybe they would come up with something creative.

The problem with those devices mentioned in OP seems to be more Windows related (autoexecuting code from USB flash drives etc).

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Reply to
Ignoramus4762

Would a repeat be necessary? PAL, for instance, is really only effective because of a leap of faith.

Reply to
John R. Carroll

if the US does it, then it certianly makes sense that China would do it as well. I'd say the Chinese have less qualms about the ethics of trapdooring the US market.

Reply to
Maxwell Lol

April Fool's joke in Infoworld

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Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

What kind of network cards are you using? All of mine have a small EAROM to store the MAC, typically in a 24C08. That isn't executable ram. It simply stores configuration data in a 1K * 8 format. How are you going to write a back door or virus in a couple hundred bytes of non-executable RAM?

Read the data sheets for the NIC chips and see what can and can't be done. I NEVER use a boot ROM in a network card, and have never seen a properly configured network that had access to the outside world using them.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

You would have to be really nearsighted to read and modify the mask. Really smart to read the mask/modify, beyond a monkey brain.

Who is talking about software? Oh, I know that is the precursor to this part of the thread. But you have introduced a herring here.

But that is what you do, Eh Gunner?

Mask, firmware, efirm, software. All very different...

Reply to
Dan Bloomquist

And yet all so very similar. Wanna hear my explaination of how 10 years as an EMT relates to being a Unix sysadmin?

Reply to
Dave Hinz

My source was a paper memo passed around the Air Force's Electronics Systems Center in '91 that gave very considerable technical detail about how it was (or could have been) done.

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

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