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US Tech Firms Fear China Could Be Spying On Them Using Power Cords, Report Says (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Fearing that China could be spying on them using power cords and plugs, several U.S. technology companies have asked their Taiwanese suppliers to shift production of some components out of the mainland, Nikkei Asian Review reported on Friday. The report cited unnamed executives from two Taiwanese companies: Lite-On Technology, a manufacturer of electronic parts, and Quanta Computer, a supplier of servers and data centers. Lite-On's clients include Dell EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, while Quanta counts Google and Facebook among its customers, according to Nikkei. The executives told Nikkei that some of their American clients -- without specifying which companies -- asked them to move out of China partly because of cyberespionage and cybersecurity risks. The U.S. tech firms were worried that even mundane components such as power plugs could be tapped by Beijing to access sensitive data, according to the report. According to the report, Lite-On Technology is building a new factory in Taiwan to manufacture power components for servers due to China's cybersecurity concerns. Quanta has also shifted production out of mainland China to Taiwan due to similar concerns, as well as additional tariffs imposed by Washington as a result of the U.S.-China trade war.
If you're worried about power plugs, you should be worried about anything that plugs in, or even is battery powered. An office heater or fan, desk lamp, etc can spy on your power signature almost as well as the extension cord used to power things. A battery powered headset can spy wirelessly too. You could even take it a step further and suspect shoes made in China, they could contain kinetically charged batteries with spying equipment.
So, if you want to be paranoid, you have to ban everything made in China.
the bump could be a ferrite. it could be a tap. easy enough to cut off the insulation on X number of cords and see what's there. or soak them in methylene chloride for a while.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Next thing you know, you'll tell me that power lines can be used to provide high speed internet to devices,
They can, but the signals don't tend to survive going through panels/breakers. Even the low-bitrate communications used in X10 home automation systems often have the same problem. If you got enough of them in your building they could bypass internal firewalls, but it's not a realistic way to get data out of a building.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"