Intel suffers massive data breach involving confidential company and CPU information revealing hardcoded backdoors.

[The Sloth]

9 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Spoiler

Hope this hurts Intel a bit longer than a week. 

 

why? am i the only one hoping Intel bounces back and gives AMD competition or AMD will become the new intel. 

[The1Dickens]

7 hours ago, japers said:

The Biggest of oofs.

7 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

If you were trying to make a joke, you have to do better.

 

You're right... this is Intel, after all...

BigOof+++

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, japers said:

 

Summary

 

- Intel ME Bringup guides + (flash) tooling + samples for various platforms

 

 

My thoughts

 I hope this leads to more understanding about the internals of the Intel ME. Last few years have shown that it’s a tremendous security liability, and the best way to mitigate this is if we all get a better understanding of how it works.

Update: They used the password Intel123. They probably deserved it.

 

Sources (Original tweet and TH link)

https://twitter.com/deletescape/status/1291405688204402689

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/massive-20gb-intel-data-breach-floods-the-internet-mentions-backdoors

Figuring out the ME might be interesting but, excessively dangerous for spies to have, since if you can forge a ME firmware, you can quite literately have an unremovable backdoor into the system that can not be detected by anything. On the plus side, it's likely the ME can be wiped much easier knowing how to access it. Kinda makes the ME worthless for asset management though.

9 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

At least the PDFs are pretty much as expected of any huge company.

Training presentations, product Q&A and certification, release notes, reference schematics and VHDL files used to build them, etc.

 

I didn't found anything that relevant or compromising.

 

If you were trying to make a joke, you have to do better.

Just like with the Nintendo leaks, I don't think anyone is going to find anything super-useful unless they were already somewhat intimately familiar with the actual source. Like the Nintendo source code pretty much needed the Nintendo SDK's to compile them, and not all the source code was complete. I haven't even bothered to look at the Intel stuff because quite honestly there really isn't that much worth looking at. It's not like you can compile an Intel CPU that is unreleased. You might learn something from the documentation, but it's not like Intel hasn't released documentation for the chips. You have to know how to use them to make compilers and stuff.

 

 

 

[Guest]

I feel sorry for Intel. Sure they had a big run with no competition, but now that AMD is ahead and Intel failing to deliver - this is still not healthy competition.

 

When all the major operating systems are released on ARM and have a much bigger acceptance by the public, they will have much more competition. 

[porina]

I've been out of work for a few months and had forgotten the below is a thing (about the simple passwords).

 

It was quite annoying where I worked. For security, if you sent a zip file containing an executable, the AV would silently remove it. So the recipient would think they got the package but can't figure out how to run it, since the file was no longer there.

[RejZoR]

ZIP format doesn't encrypt file names meaning antiviruses can still detect it's an EXE inside ZIP archive. RAR or 7z on the other hand support filename encryption in which case it would just go through no problem. Also some antiviruses are capable of basic decryption of attachments when bad guys started encrypting them and placing password inside e-mail body to evade gateway detection. Antiviruses either brute forced the password or looked for it in the mail body.

[NeuesTestament]

They just can't catch a break, can they?

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, porina said:

I've been out of work for a few months and had forgotten the below is a thing (about the simple passwords).

 

It was quite annoying where I worked. For security, if you sent a zip file containing an executable, the AV would silently remove it. So the recipient would think they got the package but can't figure out how to run it, since the file was no longer there.

This just goes to show you only need a little bit of relevant contextual information and the situation goes from looking pretty bad to being so mundane it could cure insomnia.

[spartaman64]

12 hours ago, The Sloth said:

why? am i the only one hoping Intel bounces back and gives AMD competition or AMD will become the new intel. 

because it would require intel to constantly mess up for like 10 years for amd to reach the position intel is at and they are not even close rn. intel's rnd budget is 13.6 billion dollars and amd's is 1.5 billion. intel's total assets is 136 billion dollars and amd's is 6 billion

[BuckGup]

There are backdoors basically in everything

[tim0901]

23 hours ago, The Sloth said:

why? am i the only one hoping Intel bounces back and gives AMD competition or AMD will become the new intel. 

Absolutely. The B450 mess was proof that AMD was perfectly happy to screw over their customers for the sake of profit. They only changed course because consumer reaction was “bigger than expected” (although I personally feel it was probably more to do with the promises made by their board partners). The 4000 series CPUs will almost certainly come with a price increase, because they’re now in the dominant position in the PC enthusiast space, and I imagine board compatibility going forwards will be far more restricted than it has been up till now.
 

We need proper competition, not the farce we have at the moment, and that means Intel needs to start having a few good days.

[spartaman64]

52 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

Absolutely. The B450 mess was proof that AMD was perfectly happy to screw over their customers for the sake of profit. They only changed course because consumer reaction was “bigger than expected” (although I personally feel it was probably more to do with the promises made by their board partners). The 4000 series CPUs will almost certainly come with a price increase, because they’re now in the dominant position in the PC enthusiast space, and I imagine board compatibility going forwards will be far more restricted than it has been up till now.
 

We need proper competition, not the farce we have at the moment, and that means Intel needs to start having a few good days.

idk i feel like their reasoning is fine and its the board makers they fucked them over because they wanted to save a few cents getting 16MB bios chips rather than 32MB. probably less than a cent actually. and now they and the consumers have to deal with the headache of boards on the used market that either support ryzen 4000 and not earlier ryzens or support earlier ryzens and not ryzen 4000 and theres no way to know which board is which. either way amd is the one that loses because now a bunch of consumers who don't even know what a bios is will be pointing fingers at amd when their cpu doesnt work with the motherboard they bought 

[Donut417]

On 8/6/2020 at 3:47 PM, Tech_Dreamer said:

2020 hasnt been good to intel either.

2020 hasn't been a good year for anyone. Most years could be narrated by Morgan Freeman. This year would be narrated by Samuel L Jackson. MOTHER F******! 

 

But yeah Intel has gotten the short end of the stick. But in a way they deserve it after becoming complacent. 

On 8/6/2020 at 4:04 PM, japers said:

its somewhat interesting still.

I wonder if it was their decision or someone else's?

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, RejZoR said:

ZIP format doesn't encrypt file names meaning antiviruses can still detect it's an EXE inside ZIP archive. RAR or 7z on the other hand support filename encryption in which case it would just go through no problem. Also some antiviruses are capable of basic decryption of attachments when bad guys started encrypting them and placing password inside e-mail body to evade gateway detection. Antiviruses either brute forced the password or looked for it in the mail body.

Some emails, like gmail, won't even let you send a javascript file, even inside a passworded zip file. It becomes such a completely pain in the ass to do webdev sometimes because the AV products work against you.

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, tim0901 said:

The B450 mess was proof that AMD was perfectly happy to screw over their customers for the sake of profit.

Or they thought more customers might wanted newer features that were not present on the older boards. I mean I dont expect them to keep backwards compatibility forever, it would be stupid to think they would. 3 or 4 generations of chips on a board I think its good enough. Also them making a good profit in CPU's might lead them to do better in GPU's. AMD has a much harder time than Intel as they are in two competitive markets with CPUs and GPU's. 

[mr moose]

20 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

idk i feel like their reasoning is fine and its the board makers they fucked them over because they wanted to save a few cents getting 16MB bios chips rather than 32MB. probably less than a cent actually. and now they and the consumers have to deal with the headache of boards on the used market that either support ryzen 4000 and not earlier ryzens or support earlier ryzens and not ryzen 4000 and theres no way to know which board is which. either way amd is the one that loses because now a bunch of consumers who don't even know what a bios is will be pointing fingers at amd when their cpu doesnt work with the motherboard they bought 

 

19 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Or they thought more customers might wanted newer features that were not present on the older boards. I mean I dont expect them to keep backwards compatibility forever, it would be stupid to think they would. 3 or 4 generations of chips on a board I think its good enough. Also them making a good profit in CPU's might lead them to do better in GPU's. AMD has a much harder time than Intel as they are in two competitive markets with CPUs and GPU's. 

 

The problem is AMD/board vendors can do both, they can provide consumers with more options on newer motherboards and basic support on older.  Board manufacturers were also caught out and they know a shit load more about how the whole thing works (including AMD correspondence regarding part support) than we do. 

The whole thing was a mess and could have been avoided if AMD had of told board vendors to increase the size of bios chips to ensure future compatibility.  They knew it would become a problem long before they announced it and it clearly caught vendors out.  

 

Anyway,  to get the topic back on topic,  has anyone actually found anything in this "leak" that is note worthy or is it all basically marketing slides and product support?

 

 

[HM-2]

10 hours ago, mr moose said:

Anyway,  to get the topic back on topic,  has anyone actually found anything in this "leak" that is note worthy or is it all basically marketing slides and product support?

Doesn't look like there's much of interest really; the fact it's apparently from a third party and not Intel themselves is highly likely to preclude there being anything really juicy or commercially sensitive in there.

 

IMO anyone asserting "backdoors" within 8 seconds of this dropping knows not what they speak of.

[Age of 9394]

Is that mean people can download CPU ?

[vorticalbox]

On 8/8/2020 at 3:06 AM, Kisai said:

Some emails, like gmail, won't even let you send a javascript file, even inside a passworded zip file. It becomes such a completely pain in the ass to do webdev sometimes because the AV products work against you.

At college we used to change the file extension to something.piz things tend to not try and unzip things that aren't a the correct file extension. 

[HM-2]

52 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

At college we used to change the file extension to something.piz things tend to not try and unzip things that aren't a the correct file extension. 

Depends on the cleverness of the app. Many applications these days actually read the file header rather than the extension to work what a file is. Easiest workaround is to replace some of the header with null bytes in a hex editor.

 

We do that with malware as part of our automated triage routine to make sure that grads and interns with access to the malware zoo don't accidently infect anything.

[vorticalbox]

40 minutes ago, HM-2 said:

malware zoo

Never heard that term before but I like it

 

Makes sense to scan headers. 

 

One day I should get more into info sec