Posts by boggles

Bank of England ponders minting 'Britcoin' to sit alongside the Pound

I hope its going to be less resource hungry than other crypto currencies otherwise we might need a few extra nuclear power stations to keep it running ;)

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

I've worked in the hardware industry for over 20 years and visited factories in China and Taiwan many times, often with large Western European customers doing security and quality audits.

Mainboard production runs are not usually done in tens or hundreds, but many thousands at a time (its not worth the job setup time to do small runs) The factories have the strictest ISO process controls, and much of the QA is automated and performed by computers, not humans. So it would be necessary to hack the process control and QA software system and pay off key members of production staff involved. Making a change to a handful of products mid run would be even more difficult than changing an entire days work of say 5000 boards.

So lets imagine an entire production run of 10,000 units gets changed, then there is the distribution. The boards end up in finished systems or sold as boards through the distribution channel and potentially some large direct customers. Distributors sell the systems all over the world.......

....and after 8 years no-one can provide evidence of one of these "altered" mainboards ?

The cover up operation for this "hack" must be a bigger conspiracy than the altering of the boards themselves would have been :)

Personally i think its anti China trade propaganda, with a goal to sow doubt and put pressure on to move more tech manufacturing back to the USA, I guess we will never find out just who is behind it....just another example of fake "news" in our media today.

I remember the last time this story reared its head, it won multiple awards at DEFCON as the security industry joked about how daft it was......