NSA planted surveillance software on hard drives, report says
Found on CNet News on Tuesday, 17 February 2015
In a new report, Kaspersky revealed the existence of a group dubbed The Equation Group capable of directly accessing the firmware of hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Micron, Samsung and other drive makers. As such, the group has been able to implant spyware on hard drives to conduct surveillance on computers around the world.
Kaspersky's analysis was right, a former NSA employee told Reuters, adding that the agency valued this type of spyware as highly as Stuxnet. Another "former intelligence operative" said that the NSA developed this method of embedding spyware in hard drives but said he didn't know which surveillance efforts used it.
In the past the US said that any form of hacking can be considered an act of war and they could respond accordingly. With all the details that have been exposed in the past months and years, it makes you wonder who the real threat is.