Also NSA Tapping Component "Hardware" Computer?

New information about spying the National Security Agency (NSA) again revealed. According to Der Spiegel reports, in addition to tapping the telephone network and the Internet, U.S. intelligence is reportedly planting espionage program (backdoor) in hardware devices (hardware) computer.

In internal documents NSA explained that the hardware in question include some kind of router and network equipment from the hard disk manufacturers, such as Cisco, Juniper, Dell, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, to Huawei.

Backdoor program planted by the NSA special division called Advanced / Access Network Technology (ANT). "No matter whatever the security wall built by the device manufacturer, specialized NSA can break through," the report said.

Division ANT often target the BIOS or firmware contains a chip in which there is an instruction to turn on the device. Because of this, planted a backdoor program that can not be detected by antivirus software and will remain entrenched despite the operating system of a computer is deleted.

ANT is under an elite unit of hackers called Tailored Access Operations (TAO). While the NSA said that TAO is one of the key elements for "national defense" U.S.. "Their work (TAO) centered about the exploitation of the network to support data gathering intelligence from abroad," the NSA said in a statement.

As quoted from CNet, a computer company Dell said he did not know the NSA spying on homemade products.

Cisco spokesperson also spoke about this news. "At this time, we do not know whether there are vulnerabilities in the new product, and we will continue to pursue all of them to determine whether we need to tackle new problems. If we learn of a weakness in one product, we will immediately resolve it. As we stated before, and we communicate to Der Spiegel, we do not work with the government to weaken the product to be exploited, or to implement the so-called backdoor security in our products. "

TAO unit is said to look for security holes in the Windows operating system crash reports. In addition, TAO also able to intercept computer hardware components and accessories to be paired spy program in it.

Author: Oik Yusuf

Editor: Aditya Panji

Sources: CNET, quoted from: http://tekno.kompas.com/, Monday, December 30, 2013, 12:10 pm.