The servers are designed in the US by an American company called Super Micro, and do not include the chip in their designs. It is thought the chip must have been added in China, during the manufacturing process for the servers. The chip is an example of a “hardware hack” where hardware is modified to perform functions that wasn’t originally intended in the design. It is suspected the purpose of the chip is to spy on American companies and their users.

The lengthy publication by Bloomberg reports that Apple and Amazon were among those companies affected, but both companies refute the claim. An Apple spokesperson told Bloomberg that they had no history of finding malicious chips or hardware manipulations in any of its servers. Apple no longer used Super Micro servers after ending their contract with them in 2016.

Amazon also disputes the claims about their servers containing malicious chips and says they have not worked with the FBI to investigate malicious hardware within the company. Super Micro join Apple and Amazon in denying the claims about its servers.

In response to the allegations, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement saying “China is a resolute defender of cybersecurity. It advocates for the international community to work together on tackling cybersecurity threats through dialogue on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit. Supply chain safety in cyberspace is an issue of common concern, and China is also a victim. China, Russia, and other member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization proposed an “International code of conduct for information security” to the United Nations as early as 2011. It included a pledge to ensure the supply chain security of information and communications technology products and services, in order to prevent other states from using their advantages in resources and technologies to undermine the interest of other countries. We hope parties make less gratuitous accusations and suspicions but conduct more constructive talk and collaboration so that we can work together in building a peaceful, safe, open, cooperative and orderly cyberspace.

[stackCommerce layout=”2″ count=”5″ sort=”best_sellers”][/stackCommerce]

The post Chinese Spying Chips Found Hidden on US companies’ servers appeared first on Hack Ware News.

Amazon’s Alexa is one such smart devices created to improve our lives but has recently became a double-edged sword for the users as well. For instance, Alexa doesn’t really turn off totally and it is always listening for new commands and background noises at home.

Thus, when the user does not mention Alexa, the unit will be in a standby mode and yet actively seek for user’s voice for any new task. At first, this seem fine for the user but on the hindsight, this mean that the user is being remotely monitored at all time.

A Perfect Eavesdropping tool?

Recently, a team of researchers from Checkmarx has created a voice drive skill for Alexa to record surround voices then later to eavesdrop conversations and finally sent the voice transcripts to third party websites.

The findings from Checkmarx shocked the researchers as everything worked perfectly from the picking up of the background voices to the recordings of conversation and the final step of uploading the contents to the Internet.

According to the team, Alex has become a covert listening device and poised serious breaches to security and privacy issues. Thus, the security firm has reported their findings to Amazon and expected the issues to be rectified by the tech giant soon.

Boon or bane for user having Alexa at home?

The study by Checkmarx has clearly showed that there are some issues with the entire platform and unauthorized people will be able to harness all that information gathered from user’s home. Whether it’s a good or bad thing, that’s hard to say now, as the information gathered can be used to highlight market trend or for ergonomics purposes.

But the true is that people hate to be spied upon and Alexa can do all these things and upload this information to the Internet without the user’s knowledge. Then, if this information fell to the wrong hand, the user may even be vulnerable to blackmail by malicious syndicate. So hopefully this bug will be solved by Amazon as quickly as possible before the worst-case scenario became a reality.

The post Amazon Alexa: A spy or home-helper? appeared first on Hack Ware News.