By Shannon Tiezzi
A cyber threat group reported to have ties to the NSA validates China’s fears of using U.S. technology.
The world is abuzz with reports that the U.S. government (specifically the National Security Agency or NSA) has found a way to embed its espionage programs within hard drives – making these programs undetectable to anti-virus programs and virtually irremovable even if detected. My colleague Franz-Stefan Gady has the details of the report over at our Flashpoints blog.
The news comes as the U.S. and China continue to butt heads over cybersecurity issues – including the appropriate bounds of cyberespionage.
The revelation is contained in a report issued by Kaspersky Lab, a Russia-based cybersecurity firm. The hacking group identified by Kaspersky (and reported by others to be tied to the NSA) apparently discovered a way to infect firmware, meaning the infection essentially cannot be removed from the computer. According to Kaspersky, the hackers could access virtually every hard drive on the market, including those manufactured by Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Micron, and Samsung. Kaspersky researchers believe the hackers must have had access to the actual source code of these hard drives – information that the NSA may have obtained directly from the companies themselves.
That is precisely Beijing’s greatest fear. Ever since the Edward Snowden leaks, Chinese officials and media outlets have publicly discussed the dangers of using Western technology. In 2013, China Economic Weekly coined the term “eight guardian warriors” to refer to eight U.S. companies that have become indispensable to China’s information infrastructure: Cisco, IBM, Google, Qualcomm, Intel, Apple, Oracle, and Microsoft. China’s reliance on these U.S. firms had long been seen as a security risk; Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities provided confirmation of those fears.
Read the full story at The Diplomat