Cheap Lenovo Mobile - China is infected with Backdoors China Military Spy for antichina Filipinos
Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology Ltd. ("Lenovo Mobile"), one of China's biggest mobile handset manufacturers, is seeking to become the second leading brand in the Philippine handset market.
As the smartphone market in the Philippines increases dramatically, Lenovo's distributor, Open Communications, is " committed to offer more affordable, cutting-edge devices, superior customer service and relevant value-added services to Filipinos," John Rojo, Open Communications' Business Unit Head, said in a statement today.
Lenovo Mobile has recently released new Android phones such as the A65 - a 3.5 inch entry level Android phone selling for ₱5,499 ($131.24) and the ₱700 - a four-inch screen Ice Cream Sandwich powered Android with a longer lasting battery worth ₱10,999 ($262.51).
Rojo said in the next few months, Lenovo Mobile will introduce more phones in the Philippine market to target both entry level devices in the ₱5,000 ($119.33) price range as well as top-of-the-line devices.
"Our goal is to allow majority of Filipinos to own smartphones, " Rojo said.
In May 2012, Lenovo Mobile's market share increased by 1. 2 percent in China's mobile phone market (feature phones and smart phones combined), accounting for 11 percent of the total. This elevated the Lenovo brand to No. 2 position, next only to market leader Samsung.
All U.S. Electronics from China Could Be Infected of Backdoor China Military Spy
Well, it's been pretty obvious for a while now that China's been hacking into some of America's most important businesses and government agencies and stealing reams of data. We've heard countless reports about Pentagon info being stolen or about critical data on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter being plucked from defense contractors networks — with China being the main suspect.
Well, former U.S. counter-terrorism czar –currently running his own cyber security firm — Richard Clarke is coming out and saying that all electronics made in China may well have built-in trapdoors allowing Chinese malware to infect American systems on command. The malware could do everything from take over a device to disabling it to secretly siphoning information off of it.
Just remember, plenty of military electronics parts are sourced from China too. U.S.-based defense contractors routinely buy things like processors and circuit boards — that end up on the Pentagon's most advanced weapons, everything from fighter jets to nuclear submarines — from brokers who get such parts in China. As you know, these parts often prove fake, something that's dangerous enough due to the high risk of a fake part failing. What's to stop real parts made in China from carrying an equally dangerous cyber trapdoor?
Here's what Clarke Recently told Smithsonian Magazine:
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"My greatest fear," Clarke says, "is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it's always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China.…After a while you can't compete."
But Clarke's concerns reach beyond the cost of lost intellectual property. He foresees the loss of military power. Say there was another confrontation, such as the one in 1996 when President Clinton rushed two carrier battle fleets to the Taiwan Strait to warn China against an invasion of Taiwan. Clarke, who says there have been war games on precisely such a revived confrontation, now believes that we might be forced to give up playing such a role for fear that our carrier group defenses could be blinded and paralyzed by Chinese cyberintervention. (He cites a recent war game published in an influential military strategy journal called Orbis titled "How the U.S. Lost the Naval War of 2015.")
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As Gizmodo points out, this may just be clark doing his job as the head of a cybersecurity company to drum up business or it might be another prescient warning from the man who predicted a "spectacular" al Qaeda attack before 9/11. All I have to say is that implanting trapdoors in electronic goods bound for the U.S. would make perfect sense.
Via Smithsonian Magazine.
Proof That Military Chips From China Are Infected?
For years, everyone has warned that counterfeit microchips made in China and installed on American military hardware could contain viruses or secret backdoors granting the Chinese military cyber access to U.S. weapons systems. These warnings/predictions recently expanded beyond counterfeit parts, now we're worried that any Chinese-made components could be infected. The problem was that until this week, these warnings were educated guesses and theories. Well, a scientist at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom claims to have developed a software program proving that China — and anyone else — can, and is, installing cyber backdoors on some of the world's most secure, "military grade" microchips.
Specifically, the American-designed, Chinese-made Actel/Microsemi ProASIC3 A3P250 — commonly known as the PA3 — chip was found by Cambridge researcher, Sergei Skorobogatov, to have a backdoor, or trojan, deliberately built into it. The PA3 is what's called a Field Reprogrammable Gate Array (FRGA); an almost blank slate of a microchip that can be programmed by its owner to perform a variety of tasks.
Most alarming is that the PA3 is considered to be one of the "most impenetrable" designs on the market. The chip is used in military "weapons, guidance, flight control, networking and communications" hardware, according to Skorobogatov's report on his findings that was published last weekend. The PA3 is also used in civilian "nuclear power plants, power distribution, aerospace, aviation, public transport and automotive products," according to Skorobogatov.
(In an example of just how military-grade these chips are supposed to be, the image above is actually taken from Actel/Microsemi's promotional material for the PA3)
Basically, Chinese cyber spies can gain use the chip's built-in malware to decipher military passcodes and gain remote access to the chip and reprogram it to do their bidding; "permitting a new and disturbing possibility of a large-scale Stuxnet-type attack via a network or the Internet on the silicon itself," reads his report.
The worst part, this backdoor, installed on chips used on critical weapons systems and public infrastructure around the word, is almost impossible to remove from the chip since, well, it was built into the device during manufacturing. That mean's you can't just issue a software patch to repair the vulnerability.
The backdoor is close to impossible to fix on chips already deployed because, unlike software bugs in a PC Operating System, you cannot issue a patch to fix this. Instead one has to replace all the hardware which could be extremely expensive. It may simply be a matter of time before this backdoor opportunity, which has the potential to impact on many critical systems, isexploited.Having a security related backdoor on a silicon chip jeopardises any efforts of adding software level protection. This is because an attacker can use the underlying hardware to circumvent the software countermeasures.
So uh yeah, this stuff is everywhere. When people warn of the potential for widespread disruption from cyber espionage and warfare, they're not just crying wolf. Makes you feel safe, huh?
Here's Skorobogatov's full report where you'll learn how the backdoors are installed and activated.
Backdoors Embedded in DoD Microchips From China
Sources: philSTAR , Defensetech.org
