On 06/13/2013 06:11 PM, Scott Helms wrote:
Not at all Michael, but that is a targeted piece of data and that means a command and control system. I challenge your imagination to come up with a common scenario where a non targeted "I'm/they're here" that's useful to either the company or the Chinese government keeping in mind that you have no fore knowledge of where these devices might be deployed. Also, no oneseems to want to touch the fact that doing this kind of snooping would be several orders of magnitude easier on laptops and desktops which have been sold by Lenovo for much longer than networking gear by Huawei.
Non targeted? Why be so narrow? For a targeted use, something that detects, oh say, "we [the Syrians] gassed the rebels" in some stream and sends it out a covert channel would be very interesting. Remember that vast sums of money are spent on these intelligence gathering systems. Whether they're targeting routers is really hard to say -- the attacker has the advantage of knowing what they're looking for and we don't. So in a router? It may just be opportunistic that they're easier or safer to penetrate? We really don't know. Things are rarely as they appear on the surface. Mike, "I just heard the Syria example from the Newshour as I typed... this isn't hard"
