Thursday, October 4, 2018

Report: Massive Chinese Hacking Found Via Elemental, Amazon Deal

A new report, published this morning by Bloomberg, says that a massive Chinese hacking effort--involving the implantation of tiny devices on computer motherboards--was uncovered due to due diligence efforts made by Amazon, as part of its acquisition of Portland-based Elemental Technologies back in 2015. According to the report, it was discovered in 2015 that motherboards supplied by motherboard manufacturer Supermicro were being hacked by the addition of tiny microchip, which allowed attackers to create their own doorway from a network on compromised machines. Elemental's products are used by the Department of Defense, the CIA's drone operations, aboard Navy warships, and elsewhere in sensitive locations, according to Bloomberg. Elemental's devices are used for accelerating the encoding and decoding of video. The report says the mysterious microchip addition was discovered only after Elemental had sent the company's hardware to a third party security firm hired to due due diligence on Elemental, as part of the Amazon acquisition process.