My niece once said a man she saw on the street made her feel creepy, a word not usually associated with just anyone or anything, but descriptive none-the-less. We know that feeling, and it has come to me now in reading about a remote hijacking flaw in some Intel chipsets which are said to go back to 2010. Intel lays this to a "mistake" in coding that allows a null to be put in the password entry and bypasses the authentication feature. As one of the comments in the article from Ars Techica said, "They had this for 7 years and nobody noticed?"
I got a chill on the back of my neck in reading that a couple of months ago, even though we were yet to find out how it might be exploited. The articles say the potential is for 8000 computers to be exploited, 2000 of them in the US. That doesn't seem like very many, but the important thing might be in where they are, not how many there are.
My chill was caused by a little known fact that Intel opened its Chinese chipset manufacturing facility in China in 2010. I always thought it was a bad idea to allow the Chinese to make computer chips for US computers. Now, I want to know if those chipsets were made in China, and if that "mistake" in coding came at the hands of a government representative in the Intel facility. I will never get answers to those questions, but somebody could, if they wanted to.
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