(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.
How can this be? The U.S. is the beacon of freedom, and Putin's Russia is a totalitarian regime, at least according to Western media. Yet it appears the United States of America and its NSA are the ones behind this blatantly anti-freedom, nefarious spying program.
They have spyware to infect the firmware of hard drives. These hard drives contain flash memory to drive their controllers and RAM caching. So NSA and others created some flashable drive controller software to infect any computers containing these hard drives. The computer can antivirus all it wants because it is the storage controller itself that is infected. A drive controller virus like this only has to wait for a request to load a .EXE file (a program) and can then substitute its virus payload for the desired program. The virus, once loaded, can then proceed to invoke the original desired program as well, leaving no trace that infection has occurred from the hard drive firmware. An infected hard drive controller can also be used to shield stored spyware from drive scanning utils.