Undetectable Hardware-Based Malware?
Hello Fred, Thanks for all your articles, especially the one I read when I first became a home computer user.
I have been curious about something for some time and wonder if you have addressed this issue in the past. Recently I read about concerns about China manufacturing computers, (free root kits preinstalled) cheap at half the price. I've always thought this could be done long ago at mother board or chip manufacturers anywhere. I use Norton AV, Zone Alarm Pro and Windows Defender. I also use SpyBot search and destroy and Lava Softs AdAware freebie.
If I was one of the billionaires driving political ideology's or a gov't interested in hurting the US of A, I would buy a few of these companies and build whatever I wanted into these programs to serve my ends. Is there an agency that vets all these programs and mirror sites, looking for malicious code silently waiting to be initialized.
I'm not some kind of paranoid schizophrenic, and neither am I. Thanks, Dennis
Neither are we, Dennis. <g>
*Could* that kind of thing be done? Well, maybe; especially if something nasty was inserted at the hardware level (say, in the BIOS) where it could operate "below" the operating system and normal software tools.
But it would be very hard to do, and I doubt it would get very far, undetected. Yes, some number of systems could be sold or shipped, but the number would likely be tiny, percentage-wise, before the evil code came to light. It'd follow the same pattern as the original stealth adware, rootkits, and so on--- brief success, followed by exposure and then permanent protection.
BTW, you don't have to go overseas for that kind of thing. Remember when I talked about the new Intel-based Apple Macs? I said the Mac OS would look for a special chip or circuitry and refuse to run on any non-Apple hardware, even if the hardware was otherwise identical. But the converse would not be true: Windows doesn't care much what hardware it's on--- it'll try to run on just about *anything*.
Well, no big surprise, Apple's recent announcement of how its new Intel-based PCs can seamlessly run Windows was hailed by some as an example of wonderful Apple technology. But along with that came the other news: Apple is using DRM code--- digital rights management--- built into the Intel CPUs it's using to ensure that the Mac OS can only run on Apple hardware.
It's a wholly arbitrary restriction: There is no technical reason whatsoever why Apple couldn't let its OS run on Gateways, or Dells, or whatnot. But Apple wants all the profits--- software *and* hardware--- for itself.
So you don't have to look to evil governments to find examples of the use of low-level hardware trickery. It's happening right here, right now.
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