[quote]"It is there, deep inside your computer, if they decide to call it up,” the security chief of a multinational corporation told The Investigator. “It is capable of providing Chinese intelligence with everything stored on your system — on everyone’s system — from e- mail to documents. I call it Call Home Technology. It doesn’t mean to say they’re sucking data from everyone’s computer today, it means the Chinese think ahead — and they now have the potential to do it when it suits their purposes.”
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This was reported on German computer news a while back. A security guard (I guess it was in Germany) had heard the typical interference noise of another cell phone operating at close range when he was in a deserted shop (him being the only one there after closing time). He found out, source of the phone call was a credit card scanner, which apparently phoned “home”. Later investigation showed the chip had an inbuilt mobile phone which phoned a number in … (I think it was Pakistan). The phone calls were quite randomly (not always) and focussed on Gold cards and likewise.
The China-made chip inside that scanner had all that function added. I guess we are looking at a whole new form of attacks on electronic systems…
I will search the link, guess it was on heise.de somewhere…
There is elements of truth to creating a chip with this kind of potential. Which is why the article singles out IBM/Lenovo but this is the same for any company that designs its own computers and Bios, that this translates to ALL computers from every manufacturer is a stretch.
Now both Apple and Microsoft can do this, with ease. They create the operating system, even you write software to detect what the operating system is doing , you may well be reliant on the operating system to provide accurate results. Then you have the main processors Intel or AMD, also US based. That would be the next chip down the line to be able to do such a task (and nooo, even if they were manufactured in China, which they are not, the chip design is not something that the manufacturer of the chip would endevour to change in such a massive way to not only be patently obvious, but most likely cause their contracts chip to fail)
Working own the line you then have ARM chips, which have massive popularity, I bet they are in almost every mobile phone, but they are everywhere. A British company, now if you wanted to build in listening ability, done. Wouldn’t even need to turn the Phone on. ARM could do it, but the company making the phone, well, they could too, if they wanted. But produce the phone in china and think they can modify their customers work . No way.
But that doesn’t mean the Chinese are not trying to embed chips that do this, the point is, compared to the US , UK , Japan its negligible.