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Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

As an ex-apple employee, all I’ll say is this means basically nothing. Everything was on a strict need-to-know basis and a condition of your employment was respecting that. I would be very surprised if more than a handful of Apple employees even knew what exactly what was purchased from Supermicro, so a random sample of employees absolutely would know nothing about this. Unless senior means Senior Vice President, it’s meaningless.

That being said, SVP level people did categorically deny it, and I can’t see them doing so unequivocally unless they really believe that will hold up on the court of public opinion for their entire tenure there.

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Having worked at FAANG companies my experience matches yours. There are people doing good work in the information security teams, but they only tell you about attacks much later, with most of the details removed. One of the assumptions is that a certain (small) percentage of engineers are also agents of state-level adversaries.

>A senior security engineer directly involved in Apple’s internal investigation described it as “endoscopic,” noting they had never seen a chip like the one described in the story, let alone found one. “I don’t know if something like this even exists,” this person said, noting that Apple was not provided with a malicious chip or motherboard to examine. "We were given nothing. No hardware. No chips. No emails."

Not once have we ever seen a tiny grain of sand sized malicious chip on the motherboards we bought that I've seen in the racks I inspected in the datacenters I had access to!

Yes, and I never saw Belgium.

It's a wonderful city.

Probably easier to build “smart” Cat5 cables that draw PoE to energise a chip in a connector to power a long-range antennae built-in to the cable (outside the shielded layer, of course) to broadcast whatever goes on inside of it to the outside - and put 500x of them in a cable box delivered right outside an Apple iCloud data-center under the guise of a typo’d purchase-order from Monoprice or Tiger Direct.

Why would apple be running Poe to the servers in their DC?

You wouldn’t need POE the nominal voltage of Ethernet can be used to power a small tap.

But with PoE-levels of power you could broadcast a very long range away, useful if you have no way of getting someone on the inside.

You don’t want to do that since those broadcasts are detectable not to mention that with PoE power levels you will still not be able to broadcast outside of a datacenter also you can’t build an IC that can even take leverage of that power while being hidden in a cable.

All of these taps rely on external transceivers that will either record the traffic for later extraction or exfiltrate it through other means.

Also while PoE has more power it’s also more sensitive to voltage drop over the line which means the tap it self will be detected while normal Ethernet works from -+0.5v to -+2.0v without any issue the voltage range is to allow for voltage drop over longer cables so any drop would be ignored by both end points as they’ll just assume the cable is a few meters longer.

This is beyond a huge stretch but your creativity is appreciated.

Why? Both the Israeli Intelligence Heritage museum and the Vault 5 leaks specifically show hardware implants that are intended to be inserted into cables like display, HID and USB cables.

Building a network tap into a CAT5 cable isn’t that hard you just need to essentially modulate the traffic into RF and have another implant near by that can intercept the radio signals.

We live in a day where we have demonstratable side channels attacks against RSA keys by listening to how a laptop squeeks when it’s under load and you think building a chip into a cable is a stretch?

Heck I have one cable like that atm which is a converter from a model M keyboard to a USB you can’t see the converter IC it’s built into the RJ45 connector the keyboard originally used without any additional bulk.

The implant you describe sounds much like this:

https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/nsa-ant-catalog/usb/FIREWALK.jpg

And this is likely not the only one the NSA has :) It’s very easy to tap pretty much any electrical bus these days which uses a cable the tap itself can be very basic as it’s completely passive.

I’ve seen a demonstration of similar taps on VGA cables that transmit the entire image to a remove reciecer which is often implanted near by in a power socket, light fixture or anything else where you have a reliable power supply and enough wires to hide and even transmit a signal out side over the power lines.

> That being said, SVP level people did categorically deny it

Again, as someone who worked directly w/ executive level people (and lawyers), the denials mean only that the statements were cleared by lawyers and probably corporate communications staff. (Obviously, Elon @ TSLA's an exception.)

After reading the story and the discussions here, I reviewed some of the statement language. There's lots of wiggle room.

All is further complicated if US gov't agencies etc., are concerned. Rules and regs that the average person thinks will apply won't. This is just how it works.

> Unless senior means Senior Vice President, it’s meaningless.

And not even then.

I suspect if someone did find something like this, they were told to bury it for plausible deniability.

"Okay, crap, you found a hardware security breach. We'll tell people inside to quit buying those servers, but we'll cough up some other reason. Don't breathe a word of this any further."

“Quit buying those servers in 8 months.”

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