Catalog of NSA compromised equipments

[Digimer]

On 30/12/13 09:20 PM, James Knott wrote:
> William Muriithi wrote:
>>
>> Another program attacks the firmware in hard drives manufactured by
>> Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, all of which, with the
>> exception of latter, are American companies. Here, too, it appears the
>> US intelligence agency is compromising the technology and products of
>> American companies.
>>
>
> One would assume they want to collect info.  How does a hard drive
> communicate anything back to the NSA?  That would require the drive to
> send the data via the SATA port, through the IP stack and then out the
> NIC.  How is that possible?

It doesn't work that way. It works by, for example, knowing when 
/etc/shadow is being read and modifying/injecting data into the stream 
that would allow an attacker to log into a target system. You'll note 
that specific support for ext2/3 FS were listed (and that was some years 
ago, so no reason not to think ext4 is also vulnerable).

At the end of the day, if an attacker has access to your BIOS, you have 
no privacy, OS aside.

-- 
Digimer
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