Hacker News Reader

Comment by 20after4 | Hacker News Reader

One of the best conspiracy theories I have heard recently is that the CCP can use one of their reconnaissance balloons to instantly switch every device that has a Chinese radio chip into DDOS mode. If that were to happen it could plausibly generate enough congestion to seriously degrade a significant portion of the public Internet. This would of course be coordinated with multiple underwater cable cuts.

It seems all too plausible, based on my admittedly limited understanding of how these devices work.

View on HN

This is hilarious. Is there any evidence that such a "DDOS mode" has ever existed in any device?

No, of course there is no evidence, that's why it's a conspiracy theory. I can't remember if I saw it on a YouTube comment or a Reddit thread. Both are only slightly better than 4chan.

It sounds like more of a conspiracy fantasy to me if I'm being honest. The most attractive conspiracy theories in the US right now have nothing really to do with China but rather Russia instead.

wasn’t vo1d something which could potentially deliver in this?

That was a botnet, which is entirely different type of threat (i.e. not baked into the silicon by its manufacturer). Most botnets out there have at some point in their life been used for DDoS, that's one of the most common reasons to have one. (Another common reason is for use as residential proxies, for personal or web scraping use.) Botnets are usually entirely irrelevant though, nobody really jumped to accuse TP-LINK of being a national security threat when those botnets were discovered. I'm pretty sure there was even someone using the exploit to try to patch the vulnerability in as many routers as possible as a courtesy.

>One of the best conspiracy theories I have heard recently is that the CCP can use one of their reconnaissance balloons to instantly switch every device that has a Chinese radio chip into DDOS mode.

This is a terrible conspiracy theory. Given how much Chinese IOT devices active in the West right now, the CCP doesn't even need to fly a balloon into the US. They can just pressure its IOT vendors to push a firmware update that broadcasts the DDOS signal.

>If that were to happen it could plausibly generate enough congestion to seriously degrade a significant portion of the public Internet.

At best it'll take down 2.4ghz communications, not the entire internet, or even all wifi networks. 5 Ghz/cellular networks will be spared because cheap chinese IOT devices don't operate in those frequency ranges, or the band is too wide for devices to jam. Moreover any important systems/institutions would presumably have hardwired connections, which are completely immune.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com