I had been reading this sort of idea for years. A few years ago I saw a test that was generally a failure but worked twice after much tweaking turning it into a proof of concept.

I'm surprised it has taken so long for this to get out into the open. Now watch the mass paranoia begin!

1984, we are one step closer to you.

@ Mithi:
If I understood the article correctly the premise is that the backdoor is hardware encoded or at least implemented into the original BIOS / UEFI so that a reset wouldn't actually help.

The article seems to be the usual xenophobic junk you can find everywhere on the net.
Replace "China" with a country of your own choice and "Surveillance Software" with a topic that is likely to raise interest (Biological Warfare would be a good start).

It's interesting that those people that discover such things always live in a country far away from the author of the article. German articles of this kind usually start with "American scientists found out that ..."

Quoting Srehtims:

Quote:
Programming was fun back then.

I agree. I was 6 when PCs were barely hitting the market. Through the aid of code snippits on the last page of a magazine twice a month and a reference guide, I quickly learned BASIC (QBASIC, actually) and would play around to see what I could do without actually breaking anything.

The first 'What is going on here?!' code that I ever created was a simple "if/then goto" loop that loaded in a BAT file at startup. But, again, it was fun because I knew what the problem was and was there to be able to stop it. I never created anything to cause permanent damage nor did I place something on a computer, leave, and imagine what they are going through trying to fix the issue. What would be the fun in creating a little confusion if you weren't there to see it?

Things have changed, though. You have people wanting to cause as much damage as possible for amusement and others who are just curious or trying to be helpful ("If I can create the threat before the bad guy does, it will put me one step ahead in working on countermeasures.") but unfortunately this can also accelerate the creation of more damaging viruses by giving people ideas that they had not worked out before to create them.


A few weeks ago I was reading through "10 worst computer viruses" articles, curious what each viruses different editors might agree on. One article at HowStuffWorks took a different approach not focusing solely on the worst Microsoft Windows OS viruses. It included a virus for Mac computers and another that attacked cell phones.