What if the manufacturers of electronic components from China have figured out a way to shut down the U.S. Computer infrastructure by storing dormant software in computer chips used in the computer industry.

Scary Stuff.....Not cool.

Any thoughts?

scary thought indeed
hell, who knows they might even have all of the exported tech. bugged already and at a time where the US gets to powerfull for its own good, or if china ever decides to attack the US (touch wood) all it would take is a flip of a switch per say and there goes most of americas infrostructure, defence, radar, offensive capibilities etc...

It has been discovered that it is the case with some systems from there.

What's more is how about if the warhead/missile designs they stole during the Clinton years was actually a honey trap giving us full control should they use them?

They always were and always will be the noname brand, dirty rat knock off capital of earth.

I hope they find all we allow them to look for.

Well, in regards to firewalls and protective systems, comparing your PC/Laptop firewall to the systems that Large Corps and Govt's use is like comparing a BB gun to a .50 cal. They might both be 'weapons systems' but they are not really the same at all. So, even if they were infected, the attacker would not be able to utilize all the hacked systems at once...preventing any true system compromise.

I wouldn't focus on possible cyber attacks too much - we have much more to worry about than that...

well corruption and deceit have to start small and take progessively small steps to stay "in the dark". no institution would risk the humiliation suffered from exposure of such an adventure if they didn't already KNOW it would succeed.

provide an example of a small country being taken over by such means that could possibly lead to an attempt at taking over america to prove this theory.

secondly, world economy is far beyond taking over the computer systems of the world. we live in a gigantic symbiotic relationship that requires both achievments and failures to succeed. you cannot envelope the entire united states economy with a virus and then expect it to produce what it did they day before.

this would be counterproductive. a more likely scenario would be the institution of computer virus that direct you "accidentally" to sites that propogate a certain agenda. subversion is the only way to win the masses.

well, although some parts of computer systems, circuit boards, chips, hard drives and the like, are built in China(mainland), the huge majority is actually built in Taiwan and Korea...

I can't speak with any real authority on this, but it just stands to reason that when dealing with systems like this which have to be kept secure that somewhere along the way they'd have an engineer or whoever look things over a bit?

It's a great gag in Stargate SG-1 and all kinds of other movies and shows: the enemy drops technology into your hands, you reverse engineer it, master it to the point that you can make improvements, use it with outstanding success against the enemy for the whole season, then in the season finale, when the bad guy is almost completely beaten and should have long ago pulled every last ace out of his sleeve, he conveniently remembers that he still has the self destruct code for your vessel and also has several brain-washed sleeper agents among your team and uses them to kill off an unpopular character before being again defeated in very short order.

In real life, I'd be shocked if it worked. I'd be mildly amused if anyone actually went to the trouble of trying it. Cause yeah it looks brilliant on the one in a million chance that everything works out. But the other 999,999 times you're gonna get a call the next day saying, "Yeah, this is Chris over at the CIA. We found the spyware and lead paint you put in our new computers, and we're a little ticked off. Why don't you put tech support on the line and... well just to be safe maybe you should have somebody else start your car tonight, Mr Cheney takes these things very personally."

that premise would have been trialed by fire before it ever became successful. you'd have to show that it would even be feasable on this planet before beginning to believe that it could be done in practice and therefore used to conquer the united states.

Critical systems within government and military wont be using China made chips I can guarantee you that.

As to the rest of the consumer market components..well its not such a bad thing if your pc or firewall goes poof...lets just hope that the ABS systems and ECM systems in your vehicle dont go POOF at a bad moment.

Thank goodness my 72 Roadrunner and 86 Camaro dont have any of that electronic BS.


Cheers!!!!

I think I remember an actual case a few years back where large capacity (for the time) hard drives were infected with a virus actually built into them, so impossible to remove. The idea being that as it was a larger capacity drive it greatly increased the odds of the drive being used for business purposes - there fore any data could be very profitable.

But if I remember correctly it wasn't exactly the manufacturer who did it - a Chinese supplier 'modified' them... But y'know, how hard is it to get a bit of inside help from the factory to do that?? a friend on the inside supplies a few tools and parts. IDK, i'm no hard drive expert.

Either way that approach it the epitome of a Trogen virus.

Every system vital to either the UK or US military and government would have been checked and double checked.

In the UK I'm sure we have a whole department dedicated to building, compiling and issuing systems that have been through thorough checks to ensure it is shielded from outside influence of any kind.

Then there's the network it connects to.
I worked at an M.O.D site for a few years, and they had all secret info stored on a system in a secure room, and in the lab they had to physically plug a red cable into the wall to retrieve information on the system. When done this was unplugged and the socket was bolted and padlocked closed.
This socket was the only way to get this information from the tech offices to the lab next door.
The storage system was old, but it worked. A lot of their equipment was old, but it did the job and therefore didn't need replacing with new tech that would need to be checked and cleared by the M.O.D and checked again in-house.
Plus these people were geniuses, they could build anything themselves.

Even if anything was retrieved, just as if anyone had a peek at a "secret" document left on a desk, the info contained would be useless without also having ten other documents related to it. All vital information is sectioned and classified in different departments.

While I have no doubt that it has been attempted in the past (it only makes sense that someone would have tried it), any foreign power trying to gather information in this way would have been detected.

If they do then its our fault for buying it all because were too cheap to use american made products.
Outsourcing will be our downfall.

Originally posted by hellskitchen
What if the manufacturers of electronic components from China have figured out a way to shut down the U.S. Computer infrastructure by storing dormant software in computer chips used in the computer industry.

Scary Stuff.....Not cool.

Any thoughts?

They build them, but we design them. If they wanted to do us harm they'd need to re-design them, no easy task considering the end result should be an IC the same size as the originally designed one, capable of computing the same logic the original ones were inteded to perform + the new logic, both without interfering with each other.

Btw, software is 'installed' in non-volatile memory(hard drives, flash memory, etc), not on chips. ICs just do the logic functions..

funny thread

some of you are saying oh theres no way that would happen, theres no way there are chinese chips in US defence/government systems etc etc blah blah blah


unfortunately one of our boys is being shipped over there because you cant even manage to properly secure your Administrator passwords or even generate them in the first place :p

it's all mute

Originally posted by RFBurns
Critical systems within government and military wont be using China made chips I can guarantee you that.

As to the rest of the consumer market components..well its not such a bad thing if your pc or firewall goes poof...lets just hope that the ABS systems and ECM systems in your vehicle dont go POOF at a bad moment.

Thank goodness my 72 Roadrunner and 86 Camaro dont have any of that electronic BS.


Cheers!!!!

Plainly put. You are wrong. They do use China made chips.

Last week, I happened to meet a retired Chinese guy who lives in Denver but just got back from visiting relatives in China. The funny thing was, he kept saying "don't ever trust China! The U.S. should never, ever trust China." I had to smile. Here's a guy who should know something about the character of his own people. He went on to say that he's convinced that elements within the Chinese government and industry are constantly up to no good.

Originally posted by switching yard
Last week, I happened to meet a retired Chinese guy who lives in Denver but just got back from visiting relatives in China. The funny thing was, he kept saying "don't ever trust China! The U.S. should never, ever trust China." I had to smile. Here's a guy who should know something about the character of his own people. He went on to say that he's convinced that elements within the Chinese government and industry are constantly up to no good.

Is that not true of most governments? I'm sure there are elements within the US, UK, Oz, NZ, JP, SP, BR, IR, RU etc that are up to no good

Again im a firm believer that the military already have quantum computers...scientists have already added numbers together using a couple of atoms..we all know the military is ahead in technology,but im guessing it would have cost a fortune to make so only one..which is all you need really..unless china has them also there is no chance in hell they are hacking into that..anyway storing software on a chip would be discovered far too easily.