I had the misfortune of going through a vulnerability analysis with a government contractor on one of NetApp's products a while ago. I was amazed at how many ways they had figured out how to get data out of the storage unit without using either Ethernet or fiber channel. To be honest though I knew it was going to be rough when they asked if we had tested operating our equipment in a vacuum. (answer no, we depend on air for heat exfiltration).

Anything that is interesting at a bank, health or national security level should already be fairly well protected:

* underground or otherwise well shielded facilities

* dedicated server rooms, switch rooms, comms rooms etc etc

* manned 2 stage gates for entry into facility + (electronic) access going into any department inside.

* strict regulations on what kind of equipment goes into the facility. (Wireless anything has been taboo since it came I think.)

What this doesn't handle is mostly:

* hostile sysadmins. You can only do so much about hostile insiders. Pair work, swapping peers, only allow updates once they have been vetted by a second crew etc can reduce the risk as can something as simple as being nice.

* hostile contractors that makes it through despite your extensive vetting. They must also be cold enough to bring fancy surveillance gear despite the risk of getting caught.

* stuxnet-levels of effort from a resourceful and determined opponent, piercing your firewall carefully from the inside. Still then it would take time to get anything meaningful from electronic noise (and at this point the attacker can likely just read the data from memory, Target Credit Card style.

All of this equipment needs power so that could be another attack vector. For example, we already have powerline networking. In theory you could include something like that in a power supply, after all it does connect to the motherboard and expansion cards. Of course it would require collusion among many different companies but it may not be out of the realm of a nation state attack.

No it wouldn't, it would just require intercepting the computer / parts en-route:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-...

I remember reading about this.

You are right. But to our defense: at this point we are again beyond the passive eavesdropping scenario I think we discussed above.

When you own the networking gear it is more or less game over for the victim anyway, isn't it?

Agree. Then again a lot of power goes into such sites, often in redundant setups so actually exfiltating anything that way sounds like nation state level for me as well.

Hi Sytse, you list 'Wireless keyboard' but you can also bridge the gap with a wired keyboard by detecting (and amplifying, perhaps even through walls) the clicking sounds (or electromagnetic waves) and crack the code by frequency analysis etc. Using a dvorak, personalized layout or an esoteric language like i do could perhaps partially mitigate such attack. See:

http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/publications/thesis/online/IM100855....

http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/keyboard/