While I don't think Bloomberg's story looks very plausible, perhaps one motivation for cryptic hardware modification at a time when firmware weaknesses were bei

While I don't think Bloomberg's story looks very plausible, perhaps one motivation for cryptic hardware modification at a time when firmware weaknesses were being discovered might be precisely because the easier-to-exploit firmware weaknesses were being discovered, and so might not be exploitable much longer? It might not have seemed plausible that the vulnerabilities would be discovered but then not fixed to the extent that, it turns out, they were not.