Comment on In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s funny, because it’s their government’s version of knockoff spyware, and decades out of date. Western governments get a live feed out of their backdoors.
gwilikers@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Oh yeah, have there been reports on this ?
(Not trying to shut you down, I’m genuinely curious)
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, there have been various leaks over the years that trickle out. Supposedly they’ve banned companies from operating in the US for refusal to comply with backdoor demands (Hawei, Kaspersky), some reports of backdoors built right into both Intel & AMD processors, some vague stuff that’s come out about backdoors in Windows, etc. Even when the companies refuse to comply, there’s been reports of US intelligence going into factories or intercepting deliveries to install spy chips into hardware. I recall there was a local ISP provider somewhere in the mid-west that got shut down for refusing to install spy devices in their facilities.
Really a lot of this was confirmed as far back as Snowden. And plenty of whistleblowers and leaks since.
hernanca@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There’s an extremely powerful backdoor in every processor/chipset. Intel named it “Management Engine” and AMD “Secure Technology”.
From the Wikipedia page on Management Engine:
ME has Serial over LAN, so it’s possible that it has a more intimate access to your hardware than your Operating System.
I imagine other manufacturers have similar frameworks.
Full article.
jim3692@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
Sure, those could theoretically be used for backdoor access to your computer.
However, they are trivial to spot on most routers. If you see another device on the ethernet port that your computer connects to, then something weird is going on.
Another important consideration is the fact that those technologies are meant for ethernet, while most people use laptops with wifi.