Samsung устанавливает антивирус от McAfee в смарт-телевизоры

Samsung добавил в магазин приложений для своих смарт-телевизоров 2019 года, работающих на TIZEN OS, антивирусное ПО McAfee. Таким образом производитель желает создать дополнительную защиту своих аппаратов от вредоносных программ.
"Компания McAfee продлила контракт на предварительную установку пакета McAfee Security for TV на все телевизоры Samsung Smart, выпущенные в 2019-м году. Samsung является первой в мире компанией, которая предварительно установила систему безопасности на эти устройства, подчёркивая свою приверженность созданию безопасности с самого начала. McAfee Security for TV будет сканировать приложения, которые работают на смарт-телевизорах Samsung, для выявления и удаления вредоносных программ", – прокомментировала пресс-служба Samsung.
Партнёрство с поставщиками программного обеспечения является довольно распространённой практикой для крупных вендоров. Производители ноутбуков часто предустанавливают антивирусную защиту в обмен на значительные выплаты. Кстати, производители смартфонов в этом плане ничем не отличаются.
Однако эта, казалось бы, рядовая новость, вызвала волну "хайпа" со стороны ненавистников Samsung. Они стали массово распространять слухи, что, мол, операционная система, установленная в телеприёмниках, ненадёжна.
В качестве аргумента они приводят ссылку на давнюю историю с 27-летним израильским "исследователем по безопасности" Амихаем Нейдерманом, который на поверку оказался обыкновенным мошенником-вымогателем, пытавшемся заполучить деньги от Samsung за якобы обнаруженные "критические уязвимости" в ОС TIZEN. Не добившись желаемого, Нейдерман пустился во все тяжкие и обнародовал свои "умозаключения" на "удачно подвернувшемся" форуме по безопасности Лаборатории Касперского, тесно связанной с российской ФСБ. Последняя, по мнению инсайдеров отрасли, была очень заинтересована в дискредитации TIZEN OS из-за того, что лоббировала в пользу "Ростеха" (который возглавляет близкий друг Путина со времён его работы в КГБ Сергей Чемезов)  продвижение конкурирующей "отечественной" ОС Sailfish Rus (теперь она "патриотично" переименована в "Аврора"), которая на самом деле является ни чем иным, как неудачно клонированной версией Sailfish OS от финской компании Jolla (последняя когда-то фактически была куплена российским олигархом Григорием Берёзкиным, тесно связанным с Кремлём). Собственно, в дискредитации TIZEN была заинтересована и сама Лаборатория Касперского, взявшаяся разрабатывать собственную "абсолютно безопасную" ОС.
Как указывают наши источники, спецоперация по выводу TIZEN из игры на российском корпоративном рынке была обусловлена исключительно финансовыми соображениями, поскольку "отмыть кучу бабла" с помощью полностью подконтрольной платформы куда легче, чем "разводить на бабки" гигантский Samsung, который старается избегать любых коррупционных схем. 
Мы уже не раз касались этой темы в наших публикациях, поэтому всех желающих отсылаем к соответствующим страницам ресурса Samsung World.
Тем, кто ещё не в теме, напомним, что с 2015 года Samsung использует в своих смарт-телевизорах многоуровневую защиту как на программном, так и на аппаратном уровне. Почти за 4 года, прошедших с того момента, как TIZEN пришла в телевизоры ведущего южнокорейского брэнда, юридически не зафиксировано ни одного случая взлома или кражи данных с указанных устройств.
Samsung, мировому лидеру продаж смарт-телевизоров,  в очередной раз пришлось успокаивать скептиков, напомнив, что McAfee необходим для дополнительной безопасности тем, кто ставит приложения не из официального магазина, то есть несертифицированных программных продуктов, что потенциально может навредить оборудованию.
Также в очередной раз придётся напомнить, что даже весьма острожная в вопросах безопасности Apple ранее объявила, что переносит сервисы Apple TV и iTunes Movies на телевизоры Samsung, который будет первым эксклюзивным поставщиком видеоконтента от корпорации из Купертино.

Samsung is loading McAfee antivirus software on Smart TVs

Samsung added McAfee antivirus software to the app store for its 2019 smart TVs. Thus, the manufacturer wants to create additional protection of their devices against malware.
"Samsung is the first company in the world to pre-install a security system on these devices, emphasizing its commitment to creating security from the very beginning. McAfee Security for TV will scan apps that run on Samsung smart TVs to detect and remove malware," commented the Samsung press service. 
Partnership with software vendors is a common practice for large hardware manufacturers. Notebook makers often preinstall antivirus protection in exchange for significant payouts. By the way, manufacturers of smartphones, especially in the budget segment, do the same.  
However, this seemingly ordinary news, caused a wave of indignation from the side of Samsung haters. They began to massively spread rumors that the operating system installed in the television receivers, allegedly unreliable. As an argument, they cite a long history of the Israeli "security researcher" Amihai Neiderman, who in reality turned out to be an ordinary extortionist fraud. In 2017, he intended to get money from Samsung for allegedly identified "critical vulnerabilities" in TIZEN OS.
Not having achieved the desired, Neiderman published his "conclusions" at the Kaspersky Lab security forum, which is closely related to the Russian FSB. Kaspersky Lab, according to industry insiders, was very much interested in discrediting TIZEN OS at the time. This was due to lobbying in favor of the holding "Rostech" (he is headed by a close friend of president Putin since the work of the KGB Sergei Chemezov) competing "domestic" OS Sailfish Rus (now it is called "Aurora"), which fought with TIZEN for the right to establish itself in the corporate sector.
In fact, Sailfish Rus is an unsuccessfully cloned version of Sailfish OS from the Finnish company Jolla. Back in 2015, Jolla came under the auspices of Russian oligarch Grigory Berezkin, who is closely associated with the Kremlin. At that time, the Russian leadership was in desperate need of alternative software that could allow it to be "independent of the United States." But in reality, everything turned into a banal corruption scandal.
At some stage, the Kremlin scammers realized that it would not work to get corrupt "kickbacks" from working with Samsung and TIZEN OS. That is why they needed an "import substitution" in the form of Jolla Oy and Sailfish OS, which was actually captured by the oligarch Berezkin. Moreover, Kaspersky Lab itself was interested in removing TIZEN from the russian corporate market, since it is simultaneously developing its own "safe" operating system.     
According to our sources, the operation to remove TIZEN from the game on the Russian corporate market of mobile operating systems was due solely to corruption considerations. At the same time, the leading Russian software specialists consider TIZEN the only real contender for an adequate replacement of Android and iOS.
The consequences of the Russian "special operation" against TIZEN OS, the Samsung company still feels. Unaware of what is happening, the Western media continues to replicate the lies about TIZEN. No one in the West knows that TIZEN OS passed the strictest security checks at the same FSB and in 2016 became the only mobile operating system that received a security certificate. Android and iOS do not have such a certificate.
Recall that since 2015, Samsung has been using multi-level protection in both its software and hardware levels in its TIZEN TVs. Nearly 4 years have passed since TIZEN came to the TVs of the leading South Korean brand, not a single case of hacking or theft of personal data from these devices has been legally recorded.
Samsung once again had to reassure skeptics, recalling that McAfee is necessary for additional security for those who put applications not from the official app store for smart TVs. Also, the most cautious in matters of security, Apple previously announced that it is transferring Apple TV and iTunes Movies services to Samsung TVs, which will be the first exclusive supplier of video content from the Corporation from Cupertino.

Как весь мир оказался под шпионским колпаком Китая

А Балда ему с укоризной: "Не гонялся бы ты, поп, за дешевизной!"
(Финальная строка "Сказки о попе и его работнике Балде")

Авторитетное издание Bloomberg опубликовало отчёт, согласно которому Китай шпионил примерно за 30 американскими компаниями, включая Apple, Amazon, и несколькими государственными агентствами. Журналисты ссылаются на данные 17 анонимных источников из разных организаций. Слежка велась с помощью миниатюрных чипов, установленных на платы для серверов.
Как сообщается, аппаратная "закладка" была разработана инженерами Китайской народно-освободительной армии. Это микрочипы, по размерам соизмеримые с острым кончиком карандаша. Некоторые микросхемы были выполнены таким образом, чтобы они выглядели как сигнальные контакты. Образцы включали память, возможность передачи данных и достаточную вычислительную мощность для взлома. Чипы тайно устанавливались на продукцию компании Supermicro, которая контролируется этническими китайцами. Supermicro, расположенная в районе калифорнийского города Сан-Хосе, является одним из крупнейших в мире поставщиков серверных материнских плат. Последние использовались для создания серверов многих американских компаний.
Как только сервер устанавливали и включали, микрочип вносил изменения в ядро операционной системы, чтобы та не обнаружила шпионское оборудование. При необходимости хакеры могли посылать на чипы различные команды, чтобы считывать проходящую информацию или манипулировать ею.
В ответ на публикацию Apple и Amazon поспешили заявить, что в их оборудовании якобы не было выявлено никаких шпионских чипов, хотя источники Bloomberg утверждают обратное. Ещё в 2015-м году обе компании "задним числом" обнаружили наличие китайской аппаратной закладки, но предпочли не предавать это дело огласке, а просто по-тихому растрогли контракты с Supermicro и сообщили о "находке" соответствующим ведомствам.
Ввиду щекотливости ситуации американским властям также было невыгодно раздувать скандал, иначе акции ведущих мэйджоров могли бы катастрофически обвалиться. Тем не менее проблема никуда не исчезла, и как говорят специалисты, Китай продолжает совершенствовать шпионское оборудование, пользуясь своим монопольным положением единственного производителя многих электронных девайсов, которые продаются по всему миру.
Приглашённый эксперт блога Samsung World Николай Изнов уже давно предупреждал об опасности фактической передачи на откуп Китаю мировой электронной промышленности, однако жадность тех же американских корпораций типа Apple не знает пределов. В погоне за сверхприбылями они готовы заключить сделку с дьяволом, лишь бы "стричь купоны" со своих поделий сомнительного качества.
Что уж говорить о России, которая с готовностью отдалась Китаю в добровольное технологическое рабство. Практически все мобильные операторы связи в РФ используют китайское оборудование и планируют закупку техники следующего поколения 5G. Надо быть полнейшими безумцами, чтобы не понимать, какие катастрофические последствия может иметь нынешняя кремлёвская политика "братской дружбы" с Пекином.
"Поймите, что в случае даже частичного проникновения китайской электроники в военную сферу, ваши оборонительные системы (в том числе ядерные) могут быть просто-напросто парализованы. Судя по тому, какими эпическими провалами "отметились" в последнее время товарищи-кибершпионы из бывшей ГРУ, пойманные с поличным в Голландии и ряде других стран, надеяться на присутствие в военном ведомстве адекватных людей уже не приходится. Они там больше всего озабочены "духовными скрепами" и строительством гигантских храмов вместо построения конкурентной электронной промышленности.", - отметил эксперт.     
В связи с вышесказанным становится очевидно, что лишь такие производители как Samsung, чья "прописка" не относится к странам, претендующим на глобальное доминирование, могут быть по-настоящему заинтересованы в производстве "чистой" электроники, без каких-либо закладок. Это надо помнить всем, кто зарится на дешёвые китайские посулы.

p.s. В США и Европе прокитайское лобби уже начало активную кампанию по "отбеливанию" уличённых в шпионаже производителей типа Huawei, ZTE и т.д.
С помощью проплаченных youtube-блогеров и просто дураков-добровольцев, помешанных на всём китайском, выводы специалистов подвергаются сомнению или вообще отбрасываются напрочь. Что ж, это лишь означает, что кому-то действительно очень сильно надавили на больную мозоль...  

Ниже мы приводим полный оригинальный текст статьи в Bloomberg, которую желающие могут прочитать с помощью Google-переводчика (если не владеют английским). 

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies (Bloomberg)

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.
To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.
Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.
This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.

“Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow”

There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.
One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Still, to actually accomplish a seeding attack would mean developing a deep understanding of a product’s design, manipulating components at the factory, and ensuring that the doctored devices made it through the global logistics chain to the desired location—a feat akin to throwing a stick in the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai and ensuring that it washes ashore in Seattle. “Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow,” says Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and the founder of Grand Idea Studio Inc. “Hardware is just so far off the radar, it’s almost treated like black magic.”
But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.
One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.
In emailed statements, Amazon (which announced its acquisition of Elemental in September 2015), Apple, and Supermicro disputed summaries of Bloomberg Businessweek’s reporting. “It’s untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise, an issue with malicious chips, or hardware modifications when acquiring Elemental,” Amazon wrote. “On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, ‘hardware manipulations’ or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server,” Apple wrote. “We remain unaware of any such investigation,” wrote a spokesman for Supermicro, Perry Hayes. The Chinese government didn’t directly address questions about manipulation of Supermicro servers, issuing a statement that read, in part, “Supply chain safety in cyberspace is an issue of common concern, and China is also a victim.” The FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, representing the CIA and NSA, declined to comment.
The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation. One of those officials and two people inside AWS provided extensive information on how the attack played out at Elemental and Amazon; the official and one of the insiders also described Amazon’s cooperation with the government investigation. In addition to the three Apple insiders, four of the six U.S. officials confirmed that Apple was a victim. In all, 17 people confirmed the manipulation of Supermicro’s hardware and other elements of the attacks. The sources were granted anonymity because of the sensitive, and in some cases classified, nature of the information.
One government official says China’s goal was long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks. No consumer data is known to have been stolen.
The ramifications of the attack continue to play out. The Trump administration has made computer and networking hardware, including motherboards, a focus of its latest round of trade sanctions against China, and White House officials have made it clear they think companies will begin shifting their supply chains to other countries as a result. Such a shift might assuage officials who have been warning for years about the security of the supply chain—even though they’ve never disclosed a major reason for their concerns.

How the Hack Worked, According to U.S. Officials

① A Chinese military unit designed and manufactured microchips as small as
a sharpened pencil tip. Some of the chips were built to look like signal conditioning couplers, and they incorporated memory, networking capability, and sufficient processing power for an attack.
② The microchips were inserted at Chinese factories that supplied Supermicro, one of the world’s biggest sellers of server motherboards.
③ The compromised motherboards were built into servers assembled by Supermicro.
④ The sabotaged servers made their way inside data centers operated by dozens of companies.
⑤ When a server was installed and switched on, the microchip altered the operating system’s core so it could accept modifications. The chip could also contact computers controlled by the attackers in search of further instructions and code.

Back in 2006, three engineers in Oregon had a clever idea. Demand for mobile video was about to explode, and they predicted that broadcasters would be desperate to transform programs designed to fit TV screens into the various formats needed for viewing on smartphones, laptops, and other devices. To meet the anticipated demand, the engineers started Elemental Technologies, assembling what one former adviser to the company calls a genius team to write code that would adapt the superfast graphics chips being produced for high-end video-gaming machines. The resulting software dramatically reduced the time it took to process large video files. Elemental then loaded the software onto custom-built servers emblazoned with its leprechaun-green logos.
Elemental servers sold for as much as $100,000 each, at profit margins of as high as 70 percent, according to a former adviser to the company. Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.
Elemental also started working with American spy agencies. In 2009 the company announced a development partnership with In-Q-Tel Inc., the CIA’s investment arm, a deal that paved the way for Elemental servers to be used in national security missions across the U.S. government. Public documents, including the company’s own promotional materials, show that the servers have been used inside Department of Defense data centers to process drone and surveillance-camera footage, on Navy warships to transmit feeds of airborne missions, and inside government buildings to enable secure videoconferencing. NASA, both houses of Congress, and the Department of Homeland Security have also been customers. This portfolio made Elemental a target for foreign adversaries.
Supermicro had been an obvious choice to build Elemental’s servers. Headquartered north of San Jose’s airport, up a smoggy stretch of Interstate 880, the company was founded by Charles Liang, a Taiwanese engineer who attended graduate school in Texas and then moved west to start Supermicro with his wife in 1993. Silicon Valley was then embracing outsourcing, forging a pathway from Taiwanese, and later Chinese, factories to American consumers, and Liang added a comforting advantage: Supermicro’s motherboards would be engineered mostly in San Jose, close to the company’s biggest clients, even if the products were manufactured overseas.
Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.
The company’s pitch to customers hinges on unmatched customization, made possible by hundreds of full-time engineers and a catalog encompassing more than 600 designs. The majority of its workforce in San Jose is Taiwanese or Chinese, and Mandarin is the preferred language, with hanzi filling the whiteboards, according to six former employees. Chinese pastries are delivered every week, and many routine calls are done twice, once for English-only workers and again in Mandarin. The latter are more productive, according to people who’ve been on both. These overseas ties, especially the widespread use of Mandarin, would have made it easier for China to gain an understanding of Supermicro’s operations and potentially to infiltrate the company. (A U.S. official says the government’s probe is still examining whether spies were planted inside Supermicro or other American companies to aid the attack.)
With more than 900 customers in 100 countries by 2015, Supermicro offered inroads to a bountiful collection of sensitive targets. “Think of Supermicro as the Microsoft of the hardware world,” says a former U.S. intelligence official who’s studied Supermicro and its business model. “Attacking Supermicro motherboards is like attacking Windows. It’s like attacking the whole world.”

The security of the global technology supply chain had been compromised, even if consumers and most companies didn’t know it yet

Well before evidence of the attack surfaced inside the networks of U.S. companies, American intelligence sources were reporting that China’s spies had plans to introduce malicious microchips into the supply chain. The sources weren’t specific, according to a person familiar with the information they provided, and millions of motherboards are shipped into the U.S. annually. But in the first half of 2014, a different person briefed on high-level discussions says, intelligence officials went to the White House with something more concrete: China’s military was preparing to insert the chips into Supermicro motherboards bound for U.S. companies.
The specificity of the information was remarkable, but so were the challenges it posed. Issuing a broad warning to Supermicro’s customers could have crippled the company, a major American hardware maker, and it wasn’t clear from the intelligence whom the operation was targeting or what its ultimate aims were. Plus, without confirmation that anyone had been attacked, the FBI was limited in how it could respond. The White House requested periodic updates as information came in, the person familiar with the discussions says.
Apple made its discovery of suspicious chips inside Supermicro servers around May 2015, after detecting odd network activity and firmware problems, according to a person familiar with the timeline. Two of the senior Apple insiders say the company reported the incident to the FBI but kept details about what it had detected tightly held, even internally. Government investigators were still chasing clues on their own when Amazon made its discovery and gave them access to sabotaged hardware, according to one U.S. official. This created an invaluable opportunity for intelligence agencies and the FBI—by then running a full investigation led by its cyber- and counterintelligence teams—to see what the chips looked like and how they worked.
The chips on Elemental servers were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, according to one person who saw a detailed report prepared for Amazon by its third-party security contractor, as well as a second person who saw digital photos and X-ray images of the chips incorporated into a later report prepared by Amazon’s security team. Gray or off-white in color, they looked more like signal conditioning couplers, another common motherboard component, than microchips, and so they were unlikely to be detectable without specialized equipment. Depending on the board model, the chips varied slightly in size, suggesting that the attackers had supplied different factories with different batches.
Officials familiar with the investigation say the primary role of implants such as these is to open doors that other attackers can go through. “Hardware attacks are about access,” as one former senior official puts it. In simplified terms, the implants on Supermicro hardware manipulated the core operating instructions that tell the server what to do as data move across a motherboard, two people familiar with the chips’ operation say. This happened at a crucial moment, as small bits of the operating system were being stored in the board’s temporary memory en route to the server’s central processor, the CPU. The implant was placed on the board in a way that allowed it to effectively edit this information queue, injecting its own code or altering the order of the instructions the CPU was meant to follow. Deviously small changes could create disastrous effects.
Since the implants were small, the amount of code they contained was small as well. But they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code. The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have crashed or are turned off.
This system could let the attackers alter how the device functioned, line by line, however they wanted, leaving no one the wiser. To understand the power that would give them, take this hypothetical example: Somewhere in the Linux operating system, which runs in many servers, is code that authorizes a user by verifying a typed password against a stored encrypted one. An implanted chip can alter part of that code so the server won’t check for a password—and presto! A secure machine is open to any and all users. A chip can also steal encryption keys for secure communications, block security updates that would neutralize the attack, and open up new pathways to the internet. Should some anomaly be noticed, it would likely be cast as an unexplained oddity. “The hardware opens whatever door it wants,” says Joe FitzPatrick, founder of Hardware Security Resources LLC, a company that trains cybersecurity professionals in hardware hacking techniques.
U.S. officials had caught China experimenting with hardware tampering before, but they’d never seen anything of this scale and ambition. The security of the global technology supply chain had been compromised, even if consumers and most companies didn’t know it yet. What remained for investigators to learn was how the attackers had so thoroughly infiltrated Supermicro’s production process—and how many doors they’d opened into American targets.
Unlike software-based hacks, hardware manipulation creates a real-world trail. Components leave a wake of shipping manifests and invoices. Boards have serial numbers that trace to specific factories. To track the corrupted chips to their source, U.S. intelligence agencies began following Supermicro’s serpentine supply chain in reverse, a person briefed on evidence gathered during the probe says.
As recently as 2016, according to DigiTimes, a news site specializing in supply chain research, Supermicro had three primary manufacturers constructing its motherboards, two headquartered in Taiwan and one in Shanghai. When such suppliers are choked with big orders, they sometimes parcel out work to subcontractors. In order to get further down the trail, U.S. spy agencies drew on the prodigious tools at their disposal. They sifted through communications intercepts, tapped informants in Taiwan and China, even tracked key individuals through their phones, according to the person briefed on evidence gathered during the probe. Eventually, that person says, they traced the malicious chips to four subcontracting factories that had been building Supermicro motherboards for at least two years.
As the agents monitored interactions among Chinese officials, motherboard manufacturers, and middlemen, they glimpsed how the seeding process worked. In some cases, plant managers were approached by people who claimed to represent Supermicro or who held positions suggesting a connection to the government. The middlemen would request changes to the motherboards’ original designs, initially offering bribes in conjunction with their unusual requests. If that didn’t work, they threatened factory managers with inspections that could shut down their plants. Once arrangements were in place, the middlemen would organize delivery of the chips to the factories.
The investigators concluded that this intricate scheme was the work of a People’s Liberation Army unit specializing in hardware attacks, according to two people briefed on its activities. The existence of this group has never been revealed before, but one official says, “We’ve been tracking these guys for longer than we’d like to admit.” The unit is believed to focus on high-priority targets, including advanced commercial technology and the computers of rival militaries. In past attacks, it targeted the designs for high-performance computer chips and computing systems of large U.S. internet providers.
Provided details of Businessweek’s reporting, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a statement that said “China is a resolute defender of cybersecurity.” The ministry added that in 2011, China proposed international guarantees on hardware security along with other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security body. The statement concluded, “We hope parties make less gratuitous accusations and suspicions but conduct more constructive talk and collaboration so that we can work together in building a peaceful, safe, open, cooperative and orderly cyberspace.”
The Supermicro attack was on another order entirely from earlier episodes attributed to the PLA. It threatened to have reached a dizzying array of end users, with some vital ones in the mix. Apple, for its part, has used Supermicro hardware in its data centers sporadically for years, but the relationship intensified after 2013, when Apple acquired a startup called Topsy Labs, which created superfast technology for indexing and searching vast troves of internet content. By 2014, the startup was put to work building small data centers in or near major global cities. This project, known internally as Ledbelly, was designed to make the search function for Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, faster, according to the three senior Apple insiders.
Documents seen by Businessweek show that in 2014, Apple planned to order more than 6,000 Supermicro servers for installation in 17 locations, including Amsterdam, Chicago, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, Singapore, and Tokyo, plus 4,000 servers for its existing North Carolina and Oregon data centers. Those orders were supposed to double, to 20,000, by 2015. Ledbelly made Apple an important Supermicro customer at the exact same time the PLA was found to be manipulating the vendor’s hardware.
Project delays and early performance problems meant that around 7,000 Supermicro servers were humming in Apple’s network by the time the company’s security team found the added chips. Because Apple didn’t, according to a U.S. official, provide government investigators with access to its facilities or the tampered hardware, the extent of the attack there remained outside their view.
American investigators eventually figured out who else had been hit. Since the implanted chips were designed to ping anonymous computers on the internet for further instructions, operatives could hack those computers to identify others who’d been affected. Although the investigators couldn’t be sure they’d found every victim, a person familiar with the U.S. probe says they ultimately concluded that the number was almost 30 companies.
That left the question of whom to notify and how. U.S. officials had been warning for years that hardware made by two Chinese telecommunications giants, Huawei Corp. and ZTE Corp., was subject to Chinese government manipulation. (Both Huawei and ZTE have said no such tampering has occurred.) But a similar public alert regarding a U.S. company was out of the question. Instead, officials reached out to a small number of important Supermicro customers. One executive of a large web-hosting company says the message he took away from the exchange was clear: Supermicro’s hardware couldn’t be trusted. “That’s been the nudge to everyone—get that crap out,” the person says.
Amazon, for its part, began acquisition talks with an Elemental competitor, but according to one person familiar with Amazon’s deliberations, it reversed course in the summer of 2015 after learning that Elemental’s board was nearing a deal with another buyer. Amazon announced its acquisition of Elemental in September 2015, in a transaction whose value one person familiar with the deal places at $350 million. Multiple sources say that Amazon intended to move Elemental’s software to AWS’s cloud, whose chips, motherboards, and servers are typically designed in-house and built by factories that Amazon contracts from directly.
A notable exception was AWS’s data centers inside China, which were filled with Supermicro-built servers, according to two people with knowledge of AWS’s operations there. Mindful of the Elemental findings, Amazon’s security team conducted its own investigation into AWS’s Beijing facilities and found altered motherboards there as well, including more sophisticated designs than they’d previously encountered. In one case, the malicious chips were thin enough that they’d been embedded between the layers of fiberglass onto which the other components were attached, according to one person who saw pictures of the chips. That generation of chips was smaller than a sharpened pencil tip, the person says. (Amazon denies that AWS knew of servers found in China containing malicious chips.)
China has long been known to monitor banks, manufacturers, and ordinary citizens on its own soil, and the main customers of AWS’s China cloud were domestic companies or foreign entities with operations there. Still, the fact that the country appeared to be conducting those operations inside Amazon’s cloud presented the company with a Gordian knot. Its security team determined that it would be difficult to quietly remove the equipment and that, even if they could devise a way, doing so would alert the attackers that the chips had been found, according to a person familiar with the company’s probe. Instead, the team developed a method of monitoring the chips. In the ensuing months, they detected brief check-in communications between the attackers and the sabotaged servers but didn’t see any attempts to remove data. That likely meant either that the attackers were saving the chips for a later operation or that they’d infiltrated other parts of the network before the monitoring began. Neither possibility was reassuring.
When in 2016 the Chinese government was about to pass a new cybersecurity law—seen by many outside the country as a pretext to give authorities wider access to sensitive data—Amazon decided to act, the person familiar with the company’s probe says. In August it transferred operational control of its Beijing data center to its local partner, Beijing Sinnet, a move the companies said was needed to comply with the incoming law. The following November, Amazon sold the entire infrastructure to Beijing Sinnet for about $300 million. The person familiar with Amazon’s probe casts the sale as a choice to “hack off the diseased limb.”
As for Apple, one of the three senior insiders says that in the summer of 2015, a few weeks after it identified the malicious chips, the company started removing all Supermicro servers from its data centers, a process Apple referred to internally as “going to zero.” Every Supermicro server, all 7,000 or so, was replaced in a matter of weeks, the senior insider says. (Apple denies that any servers were removed.) In 2016, Apple informed Supermicro that it was severing their relationship entirely—a decision a spokesman for Apple ascribed in response to Businessweek’s questions to an unrelated and relatively minor security incident.
That August, Supermicro’s CEO, Liang, revealed that the company had lost two major customers. Although he didn’t name them, one was later identified in news reports as Apple. He blamed competition, but his explanation was vague. “When customers asked for lower price, our people did not respond quickly enough,” he said on a conference call with analysts. Hayes, the Supermicro spokesman, says the company has never been notified of the existence of malicious chips on its motherboards by either customers or U.S. law enforcement.
Concurrent with the illicit chips’ discovery in 2015 and the unfolding investigation, Supermicro has been plagued by an accounting problem, which the company characterizes as an issue related to the timing of certain revenue recognition. After missing two deadlines to file quarterly and annual reports required by regulators, Supermicro was delisted from the Nasdaq on Aug. 23 of this year. It marked an extraordinary stumble for a company whose annual revenue had risen sharply in the previous four years, from a reported $1.5 billion in 2014 to a projected $3.2 billion this year.
One Friday in late September 2015, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared together at the White House for an hourlong press conference headlined by a landmark deal on cybersecurity. After months of negotiations, the U.S. had extracted from China a grand promise: It would no longer support the theft by hackers of U.S. intellectual property to benefit Chinese companies. Left out of those pronouncements, according to a person familiar with discussions among senior officials across the U.S. government, was the White House’s deep concern that China was willing to offer this concession because it was already developing far more advanced and surreptitious forms of hacking founded on its near monopoly of the technology supply chain.
In the weeks after the agreement was announced, the U.S. government quietly raised the alarm with several dozen tech executives and investors at a small, invite-only meeting in McLean, Va., organized by the Pentagon. According to someone who was present, Defense Department officials briefed the technologists on a recent attack and asked them to think about creating commercial products that could detect hardware implants. Attendees weren’t told the name of the hardware maker involved, but it was clear to at least some in the room that it was Supermicro, the person says.
The problem under discussion wasn’t just technological. It spoke to decisions made decades ago to send advanced production work to Southeast Asia. In the intervening years, low-cost Chinese manufacturing had come to underpin the business models of many of America’s largest technology companies. Early on, Apple, for instance, made many of its most sophisticated electronics domestically. Then in 1992, it closed a state-of-the-art plant for motherboard and computer assembly in Fremont, Calif., and sent much of that work overseas.
Over the decades, the security of the supply chain became an article of faith despite repeated warnings by Western officials. A belief formed that China was unlikely to jeopardize its position as workshop to the world by letting its spies meddle in its factories. That left the decision about where to build commercial systems resting largely on where capacity was greatest and cheapest. “You end up with a classic Satan’s bargain,” one former U.S. official says. “You can have less supply than you want and guarantee it’s secure, or you can have the supply you need, but there will be risk. Every organization has accepted the second proposition.”
In the three years since the briefing in McLean, no commercially viable way to detect attacks like the one on Supermicro’s motherboards has emerged—or has looked likely to emerge. Few companies have the resources of Apple and Amazon, and it took some luck even for them to spot the problem. “This stuff is at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, and there is no easy technological solution,” one of the people present in McLean says. “You have to invest in things that the world wants. You cannot invest in things that the world is not ready to accept yet.”

Безопасность Android "на нуле": ещё один аргумент для Samsung перейти на собственную ОС

Несмотря на то, что Google пытается регулярно обновлять свою мобильную ОС, латая старые «дыры», новыми патчами удалось исправить далеко не всё. Недавно обнаруженная уязвимость поставила под угрозу почти все Android-устройства на мобильном рынке.
Эксперты исследовательской компании Nightwatch Cybersecurity опубликовали отчёт, в котором обнародовали новую уязвимость под кодом CVE-2018-9489, представляющую высокую степень угроз пользователям Android. Она базируется на внутренней функции Android под названием intents, которая разрешает приложениям и самой ОС рассылать внутренние отчёты, доступные для чтения всеми приложениями и функциями на устройстве.
Вредоносные приложения, получив стандартные разрешения на доступ к сетевым функциям, могут «сливать» необходимую информацию на сервер своего владельца. Хакеры могут получить доступ к названию сети Wi-Fi, данным DNS-сервера, BSSID и локальным IP-адресам. Кроме того, при получении MAC-адреса, который всегда остаётся неизменным, злоумышленники смогут точно идентифицировать жертву взлома и отслеживать её перемещения.
По информации представителей компании, владельцам гаджетов с Android 9.0 Pie атака якобы не грозит, так как разработчики оперативно исправили недочёт в новейшей версии мобильной операционной системы. Но она установлена менее чем на 1% всех устройств, работающих под управлением Android. Остальные версии «зелёного робота», включая 8.1 Oreo, продолжают оставаться в зоне риска.
Исследователи утверждают, что Google не собирается исправлять ошибку в более старых версиях ОС - а значит, опасность для пользователей быть атакованными сохраняется. Под угрозой находятся не только владельцы Android - уязвимость затрагивает большинство гаджетов, использующих код от Google, в том числе Amazon FireOS.
Для того, чтобы минимизировать риск, специалисты по кибербезопасности советуют избегать установки приложений из сторонних источников (правда, сложно понять что под этим подразумевается). В Nightwatch Cybersecurity уверены, что эта мера не сможет полностью защитить пользователей Android, но позволит уменьшить масштаб возможной волны хакерских атак.
Всё это лишний раз доказывает, что зависимость крупных производителей мобильных устройств от чужого софта может обернуться большими проблемами в любой момент. Именно поэтому Samsung следует серьёзно задуматься о скорейшем переходе на собственную мобильную платформу, чтобы более эффективно обеспечивать безопасность пользователей своих гаджетов. С Google этого не удастся добиться никогда.

A new critical vulnerability in Android OS: Samsung should seriously think about its pathological dependence on someone else's software platform

A research report from Nightwatch Cybersecurity reveals the latter's discovery of a new Android vulnerability. The flaw allows apps to ignore permissions to gain access to information that is found in system broadcasts. That includes the name of the Wi-Fi network being used by a device, BSSID, the MAC address of the device, DNS server information and local IP addresses.
With this information, a malicious app could locate, geolocate and track any Android device right down to a street address. In addition, a hacker could look around a Wi-Fi network unchallenged, and even attack it. There is some good news and bad news about this vulnerability. The good news is that Google apparently fixed the flaw with Android 9.0 Pie. The bad news is that less than 1% of Android users are running the latest build of Android on their phones. Nightwatch Cybersecurity says that Google is not planning on fixing this flaw on older versions of the OS.
Not only are older Android devices running pre-Pie builds vulnerable to this flaw, devices powered by a forked version of Android are also open to this attack. Amazon's Fire Phone and Fire Tablets are driven by this variant of Google's open source operating system, which relies on apps and content from Amazon instead of Google.

"System broadcasts by Android OS expose information about the user’s device to all applications running on the device. This includes the WiFi network name, BSSID, local IP addresses, DNS server information and the MAC address. Some of this information (MAC address) is no longer available via APIs on Android 6 and higher, and extra permissions are normally required to access the rest of this information. However, by listening to these broadcasts, any application on the device can capture this information thus bypassing any permission checks and existing mitigations."- Nightwatch Cybersecurity.

This is another important argument in favor of the idea of moving the Samsung to its own operating system.