Planting tiny spy chips in hardware can cost as little as $200

'More than a year has passed since Bloomberg Businessweek grabbed the
lapels of the cybersecurity world with a bombshell claim: that
Supermicro motherboards in servers used by major tech firms, including
Apple and Amazon, had been stealthily implanted with a chip the size
of a rice grain that allowed Chinese hackers to spy deep into those
networks. Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all vehemently denied the
report. The National Security Agency dismissed it as a false alarm.
The Defcon hacker conference awarded it two Pwnie Awards, for "most
overhyped bug" and "most epic fail." And no follow-up reporting has
yet affirmed its central premise.

But even as the facts of that story remain unconfirmed, the security
community has warned that the possibility of the supply chain attacks
it describes is all too real. The NSA, after all, has been doing
something like it for years, according to the leaks of whistle-blower
Edward Snowden. Now researchers have gone further, showing just how
easily and cheaply a tiny, tough-to-detect spy chip could be planted
in a company's hardware supply chain. And one of them has demonstrated
that it doesn't even require a state-sponsored spy agency to pull it
off—just a motivated hardware hacker with the right access and as
little as $200 worth of equipment.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/planting-tiny-spy-chips-in-hardware-can-cost-as-little-as-200/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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