Catalog of NSA compromised equipments

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: William Muriithi <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| Another odd thing about these attacks is they seem mostly aimed at
| corporate products.  Don't seem to make sense, as terrorist activity are
| unlikely to happen in office networks.  Weird.

Terrorism is a big distraction.  It isn't really important in the scheme 
of things, as long as you exclude self-inflicted wounds (what I liken to 
an auto-immune disease).  3000 people were killed in the horrible 
September 11 event.  As I understand it, order-of-magnitude a million 
people are involved in US spying etc.  Seems disproportionate.

More than 10 times as many people are killed each year in the US in
traffic accidents.
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year>
Do they put 10 million traffic cops on the case?
Oh, but wait, Sept 11 was a dozen years ago.  So I guess that the
comparable figure would be 120 million traffic cops.

Fear of terrorism is used to elect politicians, to build empires, and to 
justify all sorts of things I think of as wrong.  All the way up to 
intrusive copyright enforcement (I'm not joking about that -- it happened 
in Canada with our equivalent to the USA PATRIOT act).

| Apple products are missing in the list. Looks like this has to do with
| dumping BIOS for EFI earlier.  I think EFI is more bloated so may already
| be compromised in updated list .

I think I saw something for an iphone; too lazy to check.

In that era, Apple computers were fairly uncommon.  (As are Linux
desktops.)

| The only good news is it seem the vendors are not working with them.

Why do you conclude this?  Juniper products seemed to be
disproportionately mentioned, for example.  I doubt that Vendors whole
chain of command would be in on any subversion.

| This
| mean they pick a victim, send someone to break into the premise discretely
| and plant the bug. Or is there anyway on can infect BIOS of a running
| system? Or what is their delivery method in your opinion?

Not my area.  But in theory many different exploits could turn into
BIOS flashings (notice that you don't need to flick a switch to enable
flashing?).  Those subversions would be persistent.  SMM (System
Management Mode) provides an easy way to make the result omnipotent
and hard to observe.
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