The next generation of Hacking

When Viruses, Trojans, Malware, and Spam isn’t enough researchers have found a more brutal way to hack your computer.  For years, hacking software has been the norm to gain access to someone else’s computer or network.  Now, Samuel King from the University of Illinois says hacking the hardware or the chips is the next level.  A snibbit from the article:

“New research has shown that it is in fact possible to alter chips in such a way as to leave computers helpless to back-door attacks, which would be almost impossible to detect.

To prove their point, researchers set up a demo of such an attack yesterday, in San Francisco, at a security conference called the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats. The alarming demo showed how a processor running a Linux operating system was left totally vulnerable after a malicious firmware laden chip was given instructions to allow an attacker to log on to the computer without any trouble at all.

Needless to say, this will just hype up the paranoia at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) , who already issued a warning back in 2005 about how offshore integrated circuit manufacturing could give rise to dangerous security breaches. After all, if you let pesky foreigners handle your chips, who knows what they might do to them.”