One of the biggest tech stories in recent days was an investigative piece by Bloomberg called, “The Big Hack.” In a nutshell, the story is about how China used its access to the American supply chain of motherboards to plant a chip the size of a grain of rice. The goal of this chip according to the story was “telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code (Robinson & Riley, 2018)”. This isn’t so different from what a rootkit does, but what makes this story so alarming is the fact these devices were vulnerable out of the box. This isn’t unheard of when counterfeit products are purchased on accident, but these devices were given the stamp of approval from their manufacturer and seller. Read more