I see a lot of skepticism in the original article's comments about whether this is possible or not.
Yes, it'd be hard to hide a whole TCP/IP stack in hardware (though perhaps it could be in ROM if we're talking about CPUs), but how hard would it be to hide a simple UDP-based key logger?
Look at the hundreds of thousands of pwned machines that are part of spam botnets. Clearly, machines can be co-opted.
And we have plenty of evidence that China is involved in a (asymmetric) full-out cyberwar with us.
Comments
I see a lot of skepticism in the original article's comments about whether this is possible or not.
Yes, it'd be hard to hide a whole TCP/IP stack in hardware (though perhaps it could be in ROM if we're talking about CPUs), but how hard would it be to hide a simple UDP-based key logger?
Look at the hundreds of thousands of pwned machines that are part of spam botnets. Clearly, machines can be co-opted.
And we have plenty of evidence that China is involved in a (asymmetric) full-out cyberwar with us.