Comment on In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance
hernanca@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoThere’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:
The ME has its own MAC and IP address for the out-of-band management interface, with direct access to the Ethernet controller; one portion of the Ethernet traffic is diverted to the ME even before reaching the host’s operating system.
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.
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.