4 ms·
The fact that cursory examination finds the attack is not only entirely feasible, and completely undefended against, but that the hardware shown in the Bloomber
by zaroth 8y ago
The fact that cursory examination finds the attack is not only entirely feasible, and completely undefended against, but that the hardware shown in the Bloomberg animation is precisely the hardware which would be required to pull off the attack is quite astonishing.
Whose “law” is it that the closer you are to an event the more you can see that the reporting on the event is desperately flawed? This has almost always been my own personal experience.
To have the article hit the nail on the head with a entirely plausible attack means one of two things;
1) This is exactly what happened
2) A nation state wanted us to think this is exactly what happened.
Either way the NSA is involved. The people on the ground who knew it happened would have to be NSL’d from telling their superiors that it happened, so they leaked it.
Perhaps the denials from above are entirely sincere because the people who discovered it can’t pass it up the chain.
The only thing I’m having trouble with is that would have required either a low-level plant to have discovered it and someone else at a low-level found out and was sworn to secrecy, or a middle-manager plant intercepted the message as it went up the line.
The alternative, that this is a false flag, is pretty fascinating in its own right. TAO would have had to conceptualize the attack vector, and then someone planted the story.
Perhaps this is equally likely. In fact, this is actually an attack I assume TAO is using in the field, which would burn this attack vector presumably because they have an even better one.
Even more interesting, the idea TAO was actively using this attack vector, saw evidence in the field their attack was discovered (devices going dark) and so preemptively planted a story to blame the opposition before they accused the US of the same thing.
- gerwitz 8y agoI'm voting for false flag because it's the most interesting hypothesis to imagine. Especially with the NCSC statement.
- kromem 8y agoOr, it could be both. It could have been a real attack vector that didn't actually infiltrate the companies in question due to having been caught upstream. But as "attempted attack" sounds far less sexy than "actual attack," the sources may have exaggerated the impact/discovery to further trade negotiation objectives with the spin. In fact, the BS discovery part of the story might be an attempt to parallel construct a reason it was discovered to cover for a program that might do independent testing of hardware which, if revealed, would give attackers some sense of sampling methodology to be able to counter. That would explain the vehement denials from the companies allegedly compromised and yet the realistic attack vector published along with the US entity bans on using Chinese hardware around that time.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago> Whose “law” is it that the closer you are to an event the more you can see that the reporting on the event is desperately flawed? idk, but this description of Gell-Mann amnesia seems to touch on that idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- HillaryBriss 8y ago> ...a middle-manager plant intercepted the message as it went up the line... maybe such a manager would, by doing that in this case, be protecting the top level execs