Big Brother is hacked!

This is why I always check the country of manufacture…

It is bad enough when Big Brother is your own country’s government, watching you all the time and reading your email. But how about when Big Brother’s servers get hacked, and somebody else’s government is looking over their shoulder?

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Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.

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.

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During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China

This is a hardware hack,  not a software attack.  You know those movies where the tech yells,” We have to shut down and reboot from the protected files!”.   Won’t work, this attack is on the motherboard.

The best part? This hack was NOT found by the super US Secret Squirrel gang. It was found by some un-named company in Ontario, Canada, because Amazon Web Services hired them to vet the servers. The CIA/FBI/ArmyNavyAirforceMarines/and every other alphabet-soup spook outfit was clueless. None of them checked the shit their networks ran on.

Ladies and gentlemen, every fucking thing in your life runs on hardware made in China. Your phone, your fridge, your toaster, your car. This hack was done by a chip the size of a kosher salt flake, disguised as a resistor. It had enough ROM and processing power to subvert any operating system and install its own kernel-level back door.

Now will you get the message that China is our enemy?  More than half of every dollar we send to China is used to build a weapon against us.