Your New Computer may be spying on you

[muman613]

I have felt that the best strategy when buying a new computer is to buy it without a pre-installed operating system. Although it requires more work on my part {and anyone who takes my advice} it is certainly the safest way to ensure that your operating system does not have pre-installed malware and spyware....  I prefer to install Linux operating systems as they are many times safer {regarding bugs/malware/spyware/viruses} than a comparable Windows operating system. I can even run all my Windows programs using a variety of methods {VMs, Wine, etc.}

This news article confirms what I have suspected for years. That machines imported from China or elsewhere in Asia have pre-installed malware and spyware. Some may think that this is another 'conspiracy theory' but this article from MSNBC {and I am sure there are others who are running this story} shows that this is something that the DHS is looking into...

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/07/08/7043349-us-official-says-pre-infected-computer-tech-entering-country

U.S. official says pre-infected computer tech entering country
By M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com reporter

Confirming years of warnings from government and private security experts, a top Homeland Security official has acknowledged that computer hardware and software is already being imported to the United States preloaded with spyware and security-sabotaging components.

The remarks by Greg Schaffer, the Department of Homeland Security's acting deputy undersecretary for national protection and programs, came Thursday during a tense exchange at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The panel is considering an Obama administration proposal to tighten monitoring and controls on computer equipment imported for critical government and communications infrastructure.

Schaffer didn't say whether the equipment he was talking about included end-user consumer tech like retail laptops, DVDs and media players. If so, his comments, first reported Friday morning by Fast Company, would be the first time the United States has publicly confirmed that foreign consumer technology is arriving in the country already loaded with nasty bugs like key-logging software, botnet components and even software designed to defeat security programs installed on the same machine.

Msnbc.com has asked DHS to clarify Schaffer's remarks and will update this post when we hear back.

Schaffer made the statement under questioning from Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who noted that "the issue of software infrastructure (and) hardware built overseas with items embedded in them already by the time they get to the United States ... poses, obviously, security and intellectual property risks."

"A, is this happening, Mr. Schaffer? And, B, what are we going to do to fight back against this?" he asked.

Schaffer began his answer by stating how important the issue is to President Barack Obama. But Chaffetz cut him off and, at Schaffer's request, broadly restated the question to extend it beyond government infrastructure:

"Are you aware of any component software (or) hardware coming to the United States of America that already have security risks embedded into those components?"

Schaffer paused for about 10 seconds before replying:

"I am aware that there have been instances where that has happened."

You can watch the exchange here, beginning at 51:47:

[Spiraling Leopard]

Probably any member of JTF will be suspect to investigation.

[muman613]

A few years ago, around 2008, there was a story that digital photo frames had pre-installed viruses. At that time they said the viruses were a mistake...

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11499
Malware hitches a ride on digital devices
Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2008-01-09

It's time to add digital picture frames to the group of consumer products that could carry computer viruses and Trojan horse programs.
In the past month, at least three consumers have reported that photo frames -- small flat-panel displays for displaying digital images -- received over the holidays attempted to install malicious code on their computer systems, according to the Internet Storm Center, a network-threat monitoring group. Each case involved the same product and the same chain of stores, suggesting that the electronic systems were infected at the factory or somewhere during shipping, said Marcus Sachs, who volunteers as the director of the Internet Storm Center.

"When (the first incident) pops up, we thought it might be someone that was infected and blamed it on the digital picture frame," Sachs said. "But this is malware -- and malware that does not seem to be very well detected. You could plug in a device and infect yourself with something that you would never know you had."

The incidents underscore that the proliferation of electronic devices with onboard memory means that consumers have to increasingly be aware of the danger of unwanted code hitching a ride. While many consumers are already wary of certain devices, such as digital music players, USB memory sticks and external hard drives, that include onboard memory, other types of electronics have largely escaped scrutiny.

In the past, consumer devices infected with malicious code have generally been the result of manufacturing mishaps. In October 2007, for example, hard-disk drive maker Seagate acknowledged that a password-stealing Trojan horse program had infected a number of its disk drives shipped from a factory in China after a computer at the manufacturing facility was infected. The Trojan horse would infect systems and attempt to steal the account credentials to Chinese online games as well as the popular World of Warcraft.

In another incident, a Windows computer virus snuck onto the hard drives of a limited number of Apple's iPods during manufacturing in 2006.

Going forward, infections may no longer always be accidental, said Sachs, who is also the executive director of government affairs at telecommunications provider Verizon.

"I think that supply-side attacks are going to go from zero to some small percentage," he said. "It is obviously not going to be as dangerous as mass mailing e-mail infections, but you could have some really clever targeted attacks."

In the latest incidents, three photo frames made by Tuscaloosa, Ala.-based Advanced Design Systems, and bought from different Sam's Club stores, each contained a Trojan horse, according to reports to the SANS Internet Storm Center. The malicious code appears to act like a rootkit, hiding itself and disabling access to antivirus resources.

"It propagates to any connected device by copying a script, a com file and an autorun file," one consumer reported to the ISC. "It hides all systems files and itself while completely eliminating the user admin ability to show hidden files. It creates processes that negate any attempt to go to anti virus and anti spam web sites. It prevents the remote installation of any antivirus components."

Advanced Design Systems did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent by e-mail and left on its voicemail system on Tuesday. A media representative of Wal-Mart, which owns the Sam's Club discount warehouse chain, could not comment on the issue when contacted Monday and did not provide a comment in time for publication.

[Kahane-Was-Right BT]

Probably any member of JTF will be suspect to investigation.

Sounds exciting.  Count me in.

[angryChineseKahanist]

Just look at the process list. Everything is made in china. You cant avoid it. And you cant tell most people to buy a computer without an operating system. If you find an hp, dell, or whatever brand that comes without os i will jump at it.

[muman613]

This is getting scary... Here is another article which discusses this problem with a little more depth...


http://www.salon.com/news/david_sirota/2011/07/11/trade_terrorism

Monday, Jul 11, 2011 15:45 ET
The terrorist threat we're ignoring
How the high-tech software we import from China is setting us up for potential cyberattacks
By David Sirota

According to the U.S. government, the list of known boogeymen working to compromise American national security is long and getting longer by the day. By my back of the envelope count, we have shoe bombers, underwear bombers, train bombers, cargo bombers, dirty bombers, car bombers and, never to be forgotten, box-cutter hijackers. Now, as of last week, we are told to fear the brand new "implant bomber" -- the terrorist who will surgically stitch explosives to his innards for the purposes of a suicide attack.

All of these threats are, indeed, scary -- and the last one, which sounds like something out of "Saw" movie, is especially creepy. But the fear of individual terrorist acts has diverted attention from a more systemic threat that is taking the implant idea to a much bigger platform. I'm talking about the threat of terrorists or foreign governments exploiting our economy's penchant for job outsourcing/offshoring. How? By using our corresponding reliance on imports to secretly stitch security-compromising technology into our society's central IT nervous system.

Sounds far-fetched, right? Sounds like some fringe theory bizarrely melding liberal political complaints about bad trade policies with tinfoil-hat paranoia, right? Yeah, that's what I thought, until last week when -- in an announcement largely ignored by the Washington press corps -- the Department of Homeland Security made a stunning disclosure at a congressional hearing. As the business trade publication Fast Company reports (emphasis added):

    A top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official has admitted on the record that electronics sold in the U.S. are being preloaded with spyware, malware, and security-compromising components by unknown foreign parties. In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, acting deputy undersecretary of the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate Greg Schaffer told Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) that both Homeland Security and the White House have been aware of the threat for quite some time.

    When asked by Rep. Chaffetz whether Schaffer was aware of any foreign-manufactured software or hardware components that had been purposely embedded with security risks, the DHS representative stated that "I am aware of instances where that has happened," after some hesitation.

    This supply chain security issue essentially means that, somewhere along the line, technology being marketed in the United States was either compromised or purposely designed to enable cyberattacks.

The process by which this happens is fairly straightforward -- and its connection to our tariff-free trade policies that encourage outsourcing is obvious. First, an American company or governmental agency orders a piece of computer hardware or software from a tech company. Then, because the "free" trade era has economically incentivized those companies to move their production to low-wage countries, much of that order is actually fulfilled at foreign facilities where security and quality standards may be, ahem, lacking.

If this still sounds far-fetched, remember that in the offshoring/outsourcing epoch, one of the major exporters of computer hardware -- and increasingly, software -- is China. That is, the country whose government has been at the forefront of aggressively researching, developing and implementing covert technologies that turn computers into stealth weapons of the police state.

There is, for example, China's Great Firewall, which prevents computers from accessing content the government deems unacceptable. There's also the Green Dam initiative, which aimed to preload spying and censorship software on PCs. These, of course, are just the cyber-sabotage projects we know about, suggesting that there are far more being engineered by the Chinese regime. And this says nothing of the additional possibility of stateless terrorist groups infiltrating the high-tech supply chain to invisibly weave vulnerabilities into our IT infrastructure.

If you think the biggest ramifications of this threat are merely Angry Birds malfunctions, suddenly [censored] pictures from Hipstamatic and yet longer wait times when you fire up Microsoft Word -- think again. In an information age that sees missiles remotely fired via keystrokes and data mined for intelligence gathering, supply chain vulnerabilities in high-tech products are a genuine national security problem. Indeed, they are at least as big a threat to national security as the old concerns about how, say, offshoring steel production could compromises our strength by limiting our ability to unilaterally build tanks and warships. By creating a trade policy that helps offshore high-tech production, we may be inadvertently importing spying or terrorist instruments and then embedding those instruments into our computer-dependent society at large.

What might this mean in practice? As the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported a few months ago, it could be "kill switches" implanted in Pentagon systems that control our arsenal. It could be new "War Games"-esque back doors that allow Chinese military hackers to punch in their own preprogrammed "Joshua" password and again breach computer networks deep within our national security apparatus. Or it could be new, foreign-built airplanes that run on hardware and software pre-rigged for sabotage.

The possibilities are, unfortunately, endless -- which is why just a few months ago the Defense Department authorization bill included a new provision (Section 806) ordering the Pentagon to begin formally assessing its exposure to this threat.

Like the larger society-wide issue of supply chain vulnerabilities, however, this legislation was almost completely ignored in the popular American press. And the question is why? Why in a nation that seems addicted to fear-mongering have we largely ignored what could be one of the most serious national security threats of the information age?

First, the threat is -- by design -- invisible, and therefore doesn't make for good television. That means it's not news in a society where the availability of televisual imagery often determines newsworthiness. Instead, much of the media promotes stories involving sensational images of naked-body scanners and mug-shots of dark-skinned terrorists and largely ignores less telegenic threats lurking within circuits, algorithms and code -- even though the latter threats may be far more significant.

Second, and equally important, is the fact that questions about supply-chain vulnerabilities force us to confront complex free-trade theologies that the media and political elite rarely examine, much less challenge.

For decades, the relatively limited trade-related reporting by the corporate media and the occasional rhetoric from politicians about trade has mostly focused on jobs, and more specifically, on spreading the lie that tariff-free trade pacts will result in net job growth in America (they haven't). Left almost completely unmentioned are other issues that free-trade critics have raised -- issues like the environment (what happens when factories move to countries that allow for more air pollution?), human rights (do we strengthen autocracy when we incentivize companies to move factories to low-wage dictatorships?) and national security.

The media and political establishment avoids discussing these issues (and typically writes off free-trade critics as Luddites) not because the issues are insignificant, but because the corporations that own the media and buy the politicians also profit off a trade policy that helps companies cut costs by moving production to low-wage countries. Not surprisingly, then, these corporations don't want a serious public examination of the downsides of those trade policies. And so those downsides become victims of a pernicious and pervasive self-censorship -- one that presents free-trade as an exclusively economic (and exclusively positive) issue.

Appreciating the breathtaking power of that self-censorship is simply to behold the reticence on the supply chain threat, which, at its core, raises real concerns about our trade policy. In a money-dominated media and political system that otherwise loves a good scare, the silence suggests free-trade theology trumps all -- even major national security threats.

    * David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at [email protected], follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More: David Sirota