Zyxel, Asus, and other manufacturers of networking devices (with backdoors of course) are also there.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hacke...
Devices like this are used by the government and military contractors as well, and as you can see such vulnerabilities are trivial to detect so you can't count on the opposition finding out about it and using it. This one was picked up days after the firmware release. The smoking gun would be government and military admins secretly being advised by the CIA to close these security loopholes, so the government is protected but everyone else isn't. IMHO that would get Snowdened almost immediately. There's no way they'd keep a lid on that, there would just be too many people involved.
As with a lot of this conspiracy theory stuff, it only makes sense if you don't think about it too much. Once you actually start thinking through the consequences and practicalities, it doesn't hold together.
Understatement of the year. Secret account is exactly what people call "a backdoor".
I learned about it from wikileaks. Eg https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/space_2359301.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3184435/wikileaks-documents-...
This is like someone claiming it will rain next week and when asked how they know, they say they can prove it rained last week. That’s irrelevant. Yes I know they have firmware attacks. Where does the claim they are putting it on machines in the factory come from? How many times do I need to ask the same question?
>"NightSkies 1.2" a "beacon/loader/implant tool" for the Apple iPhone. Noteworthy is that NightSkies had reached 1.2 by 2008, and is expressly designed to be physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones. i.e the CIA has been infecting the iPhone supply chain of its targets since at least 2008.
By supply chain, when they say mail orders and other shipments, they just mean between the vendor and the customer. In this case the use of "supply chain" could be miss-understood, this is a post-factory attack which would be carried out in transit, probably at a US border.
We have seen that done before to shipments of devices such as computers and network gear that have been intercepted and hacked before delivery to a suspect, or a target organisation or country.
I don't think this can be reasonably construed as evidence for Apple conniving with the CIA. In fact I still don't think that would make any sense from a CIA perspective. The factories aren't even in the US. Apple employees aren't background checked or sworn agents, they're a potential security risk. Why involve them if you don't need to?
Also if the spyware is installed in firmware at the factory, how is Linux going to help you?