Government Hackers Inside your Hard Drive.........

The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers

the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.

Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.

"The hardware will be able to infect the computer over and over,

the still-active espionage campaign could have taken control of thousands of PCs, giving them the ability to steal files or eavesdrop on anything they wanted

the spying programs show that they could work in disk drives sold by more than a dozen companies, comprising essentially the entire market. They include Western Digital Corp, Seagate Technology Plc, Toshiba Corp, IBM, Micron Technology Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

Western Digital, Seagate and Micron said they had no knowledge of these spying programs. Toshiba and Samsung declined to comment. IBM did not respond to requests for comment.

GETTING THE SOURCE CODE

authors of the spying programs must have had access to the proprietary source code that directs the actions of the hard drives. That code can serve as a roadmap to vulnerabilities, allowing those who study it to launch attacks much more easily.

(Which is why Bill Gates going to Communist Red China to show the Source Code to Windows was such a monumentally horrible idea. Bill Gates should be in Jail)

"There is zero chance that someone could rewrite the [hard drive] operating system using public information,

Concerns about access to source code flared after a series of high-profile cyberattacks onGoogle Inc and other U.S. companies in 2009 that were blamed on China.

Investigators have said they found evidence that the hackers gained access to source code from several big U.S. tech and defense companies.

It is not clear how the NSA may have obtained the hard drives' source code. Western Digital spokesman Steve Shattuck said the company "has not provided its source code to government agencies." The other hard drive makers would not say if they had shared their source code with the NSA

the NSA has multiple ways of obtaining source code from tech companies, including asking directly and posing as a software developer. If a company wants to sell products to the Pentagon or another sensitive U.S. agency, the government can request a security audit to make sure the source code is safe.

'We're going to do an evaluation, we need the source code,'" said Vincent Liu, a partner at security consulting firm Bishop Fox and former NSA analyst. "It's usually the NSA doing the evaluation, and it's a pretty small leap to say they're going to keep that source code."

http://www.reuters.com/…/us-usa-cyberspying-idUSKBN0LK1QV20…