Thursday, October 4, 2018

Amazon Investigation Accidentally Uncovered Massive Chinese Hacking

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 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 use graphical processing units (GPUs) for massively parallel encoding and decoding of video, among other efforts. 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. Amazon has significant operations in the Los Angeles area.

---