[Cryptography] My ignorance and drive firmware hacking

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2015, Robert L Wilson wrote:

[...]

> So I wondered whether the firmware had simply changed due to some random 
> glitch, we can always imagine a cosmic ray loosing a flash of electrons 
> into a chip. I also wondered whether it was "malware" from some bad guy. 
> Then I heard that many (I think thousands) of similar drives had failed 
> in the same way. Now I have to wonder if it was somebody just learning 
> to plant things in the firmware and not getting it quite right. Maybe I 
> was better off losing the drive than having them succeed in planting 
> something with more disastrous effects!

Wasn't there a discussion on this list about e.g. IBM being caught out 
with beta-emitters in the chip substrate?  Nothing malicious; it was just 
sub-standard material being used.

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Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server."
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