Hacker News Reader

Comment by janmo | Hacker News Reader

If the mossad was able to plant explosives without being caught, I wouldn't be surprised if they also planted bugs (indiscriminately) in many electronic devices delivered to Lebanon such as TVs, computers, phones etc...

Similar to the spy chips implants within the Supermicro server motherboards.

View on HN

Supermicro never happened. Zero evidence. The reporters and the paper (Bloomberg?) have never retracted it, which is a reflection of their crappy reporting.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/12/bloomberg-big-c...

Until a few hours ago there was "zero evidence" that thousands of pagers and walkie talkies had been tampered to explode via a remote command.

Was Bloomberg reporting that "thousands of pagers and walkie talkies had been tampered to explode via a remote command" for a decade? Without any evidence?

If Bloomberg had evidence of chips being tampered with, they could have produced that evidence.

That's not how any of this works. If you investigate extensively and fail to find evidence, then there's probably no evidence. If you weren't looking for any evidence and didn't find any, that does not mean there's no evidence.

I wouldn't be surprised if this went well beyond Lebanon. It's time to start really scrutinizing our tech supply chain. I won't use any Israeli tech going forward.

These things weren't made in Israel nor by Israeli companies.

If a state wants you dead you're cooked anyways

Glib defeatism and the automatic surrender to any entity more powerful than you is sad, pitiable even.

The main way states exercise power is by making large enough shows of force that people behave exactly as you do, and roll over in submission. State powers may be able to silence, extort, or kill anyone, but they damn sure can't get everyone.

>These things weren't made in Israel nor by Israeli companies.

Somebody must had put the bombs on these things

They didn't compromise anything that looked Israeli, and targeted other companies.

You assume. They've cracked down hard on anti-war protesters inside Israel. It's absolutely not a safe, nor even likely true, assumption that Mossad does not also surveil Israelis.

> They've cracked down hard on anti-war protesters inside Israel

huh? There's been weekly protests for almost a year now and last week's was the largest yet with around half a million attending

https://www.timesofisrael.com/organizers-claim-largest-ever-...

Protesters, not protests.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside...

No they didn't? There's protests every day, "they" haven't "cracked down" on anything. Occasional arrests here and there on both sides of the protests. It's a democratic country, people have rights to express themselves.

Maybe still democratic, although surely dropped quite a few ranks in democracy ranking, moving ever closer to authoritarian dictator led state.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside...

Based on your comment history that's not surprising at all. I suppose you already know that just about every large corporation in the world has offices in/business with Israel?

What history? I don't even normally comment but this was crazy and horrible. I'm aware that companies have offices in Israel. I think that's quickly going to become a bygone era though. In fact, Intel just canceled a new Israeli office.

Yes, the supply chain is very clearly compromised.

How much of it is an excellent question. It's remarkable that apparently (?) none of the devices went off prematurely and tipped off the targets. That implies a higher degree of QA than you'd expect from a more ramshackle organization.

I guess from now on they will fly it in directly from China.

How much money would it take to compromise a Chinese factory? Probably not a lot.

The Supermicro story was never proven to be anything but bullshit, though. The more you looked into it, the less it added up.

True, probably the NSA wanted to smear the Chinese when in fact they are the ones implanting bugs in hardware.

Maybe the Chinese wanted to smear the NSA by making it look like the NSA was trying to smear the Chinese when the NSA in fact were the ones implanting bugs in the hardware...

Given the embarrassingly bad security practices of hardware vendors (see recent secure boot key leak) do the spy agencies require deliberate backdoors anymore? I have lost count of the number of times Cisco has shipped a hardcoded admin password.

Maybe everyone was implanting bugs and blamed the other party for being too sloppy and getting caught.

You are joking, but that's probably the truth... Or at least that's what the NSA wants us to think!

Not just Lebanon. We should all be afraid, and assume any consumer device or software that has transited through Israel or countries hosting agents from Israel, to be compromised and potentially dangerous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com