Technology
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Can't wait until this spurs the security community into doing a deep look at the roms on these cheap Chinese boards. Yeah the malware was caught - but what's more important is the intent. This is a country that is constantly behind breaches and botnets... and here we have these PCs being marketed as router replacents and mini servers. It doesn't take much to figure out that this is free back door territory.
Yes! I've been telling this to friends who keep buying Chinese boards to use as routers and NAS ... wth
I mean depending on what board you’re using it’s unlikely it’s hardware level snooping that supersedes changing the firmware. Especially if you stick to those that run on open source firmware.
Afaik, the problem was a trojan inside the cracked windows images they used to avoid paying for windows keys. I doubt the intent was to create a botnet, it seems more like generic cybercrime.
I personally always wipe the preinstalled OS to avoid issues like this. However, make sure to use a clean image directly from the source. Simply reinstalling from within Windows wouldn't have helped in this case, because the malware was part of the recovery files.
The story originated from a video from the "The Net Guy Reviews" YouTube channel. Most articles I've seen so far oversimplify the issue and/or get facts wrong, therefore I recommend checking out the original video if you want to learn more.
Yeah malware is everywhere - This could simply be a product of an individual actor abusing their position in a supply chain.... but this also goes for hardware as well. It is certainly a more difficult vector to attack from but due to its 'level' it's a valuable position to compromise.