According to analysis by Kaspberky Labs, the US National Security Agency may have been hiding hacking payloads in the firmware of consumer hard drives over the last 15-20 years. This has given the NSA the ability to eavesdrop on thousands (if not more) computers.
The brands affected are the top hard drive manufactures including Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Toshiba and Hitachi. I bet $1,000,000 that you have at least one hard drive manufactured by one of these companies in your Computer/Laptop right now.
Kaspersky Lab has described them as “probably one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world and the most advanced threat actor we have seen”. The security researched have documented 500 infections and believed the actual figure was likely to reach tens of thousands of victims.
These infected hard drives would have given the cyber criminals persistence on the victim’s computer and allowed them to set up secret data stores on the machines which would only be accessible to the hackers.
Because the malware isn’t sitting in regular storage it is almost impossible for a victim to remove or even detect the malware. This infection could survive countless amounts of formatting and OS Re-installations and would still persist.
These hard drives were deployed in more than 30 countries. The most infections have been recorded in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yeman and Algeria. The specific people have included government, military, telecommunication providers, banks, financial institutions, energy companies, nuclear researches, mass media organisations and Islamic activities and more.
If in fact the NSA has been involved in this, it would give them unprecedented access to the world’s computers even when the computers are not connected to the web.
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