Book Review: "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends"

Re:Book Review: "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by ForHackernews on Thursday February 25, 2021 @03:34PM (#26267910)

I don't know if the NSA are the best in the world, but they're probably among the best-funded in the world.

Stuxnet is close to a work of art; the degree of effort involved in hiding self-reinstalling malware inside hard-drive firmware is staggering.[0] Anyone who's ever tried to write Linux drivers for undocumented hardware can appreciate how insane it is that they managed to do it for a dozen different hard drive manufacturers.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/16/8048243/nsa-hard-drive-fi...

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Re:Book Review: "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by moyix on Thursday February 25, 2021 @05:39PM (#26269247)

Keep in mind that a motivated academic research team was able to write a hard drive firmware implant on their own as well: https://www.impeachdonaldtrump.net/Implementation.and.Implic...

But yes, making it work for a bunch of manufacturers would be a lot of additional work (though easier if you can obtain the data sheets for the embedded microcontroller, which is probably doable if you're the NSA).

Side note: don't blame me for the URL, it was just the first place I found that had a PDF of the paper.

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Re:Book Review: "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by secfirstmd on Thursday February 25, 2021 @04:23PM (#26268510)

Let's not forget. Stuxnet is 15ish years old also.

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