4biddnknowledge:

#TheBigHack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. The chips on #Elemental servers were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible… they were unlikely to be detectable without specialized equipment.
Apple made its discovery of suspicious chips inside #Supermicro servers around May 2015, after detecting odd #networkactivity and #firmware problems. The primary role of implants such as these is to open doors that other attackers can go through. “Hardware attacks are about access,” as one former senior official puts it. In simplified terms, the implants on Supermicro hardware manipulated the core operating instructions that tell the server what to do as data move across a motherboard, two people familiar with the chips’ operation say. This happened at a crucial moment, as small bits of the operating system were being stored in the board’s temporary memory en route to the server’s central processor, the CPU. The implant was placed on the board in a way that allowed it to effectively edit this information queue, injecting its own code or altering the order of the instructions the #CPU was meant to follow. Deviously small changes could create disastrous effects.
Since the implants were small, the amount of code they contained was small as well. But they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code. The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have crashed or are turned off. This system could let the attackers alter how the device functioned, line by line, however they wanted, leaving no one the wiser. Images via @genx97
#bloombergbusinessweek
#4biddenKnowledge
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo5H_S2nScy/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1q8oe6wasb0m3