Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto.delete@this.gmail.com) on October 4, 2018 11:32 am wrote:
> dmcq (dmcq.delete@this.fano.co.uk) on October 4, 2018 10:31 am wrote:
> > The story does smell a bit as far as I'm concerned. Too many people monitor their internet traffic for
> > this sort of thing to remain hidden for very long, and the possible economic negatives are just too
> > great. There's far easier and more deniable ways of doing it. Unless one is Putin and wants people to
> > know they should be scared you try to cover your tracks. If anything like this happened people will
> > soon find a way of identifying the compromised boards and show them generally. It is about possible
> > to make something that small but they would also need to reroute a bit to get the right tracks.
> >
> > Count me as somebody who needs a lot more evidence.
>
> And yet both Google and Facebook have established their own
> RoT in servers because they didn't trust the hardware.

Go back 5 years and the Snowden files prove the US has been putting hardware back doors in Cisco equipment used in China and Russia. This is tit for tat hacking.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240185964/US-repeatedly-hacked-China-claims-NSA-whistleblower

The easily hacked management hardware that bypasses the CPU in Dell/Intel servers is another example. One wonders if the NSA was involved with that, which is my expectation.

This is part of why Google, Facebook and Apple all make their own servers and network equipment. None of the equipment you buy can be trusted.