Well, this is Frikken depressing...

[vidarh]

Anyone read this news?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2884952/equation-cyberspies-use-unrivaled-nsastyle-techniques-to-hit-iran-russia.html

The ability for malware to start doing this type of thing makes me want to curl up in a ball with my trusty old VIC-20 and its datasette.

I realize that it's describing malware on the level of inter-country espionage, but this type of knowledge trickles down eventually.

It does not trickle down, it is there already. Not quite script-kiddie ready, thankfully, but the info is out there:

http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

Also notice from that article that some of our *harddrives* now comes with 3 fairly decent ARM cores. I remember when I was amazed that the SCSI controller for my A2000 had a Z80 on it.

[vidarh]

Found this quote on Ars Technica: "While it's simple for end users to re-flash their hard drives using executable files provided by manufacturers, it's just about impossible for an outsider to reverse engineer a hard drive, read the existing firmware, and create malicious versions."

This would have been funny if it wasn't so tragic that they believed this. I posted this in another comment:

http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

So much for "just about impossible"