From: Virus Guy <Virus@Guy.C0M>

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. ôHardware attacks are about access,ö 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. <strong>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 passwordùand presto! A secure 
machine is open to any and all users.

Shortly after the report was published, the US Department of Defense has 
scheduled a national-security related press conference for 9:30 am ET on 
Thursday. It didn't reveal the subject of the briefing, but the timing 
is certainly suspicious...

Something's popping tomorrow pic.twitter.com/z66dNh6Px6
  ù Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) October 4, 2018

But regardless of what is said on Thursday, one thing probably won't 
change: Expect to hear a lot less about Russia, and a lot more about 
China as the deep state's interference myopic focus on the former shifts 
to the latter. As Kevin Warsh framed the question during a Thursday 
interview with CNBC where he asked "are we at the beginning of a 20-year 
Cold War?" in response to a question about curbing China's influence - 
both economically and defensively. We imagine we'll be hearing a lot 
more about the breach from senior US officials, including both the vice 
president and the president himself, in the very near future.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-04/exp...
ltration-apple-amazon-and-cia
--- NewsGate v1.0 gamma 2
 * Origin: News Gate @ Net396 -Huntsville, AL - USA (1:396/4)