News broke earlier this week about the NSA’s “most sophisticated” malware yet: An undetectable backdoor that can filter information to and from a hard drive, using the underlying framework of the drive itself. It surprised a lot of people, sure, but maybe it shouldn’t have. A group of ordinary security researchers warned this was possible, and in fact installed hard drive backdoors themselves, nearly a year ago.

The paper ” Implementation and Implications of a Stealth Hard-Drive Backdoor,” published in March 2014 by a team of eight researchers from Eurecom in France, IBM Research in Zurich, and UCSD and Northeastern University in the US, reads almost exactly like security firm Kaspersky’s expose on the NSA malware. The full paper is absolutely worth your read if you’ve been fascinated by Kaspersky’s revelations.

The malware, developed by Travis Goodspeed and his colleagues (Goodspeed has spoken the most publicly about the exploit), can be installed remotely by people who have no physical access to it. In fact, the paper asserts that such an attack “is not limited to the area of government cyber warfare; rather, it is well within the reach of moderately funded criminals, botnet herders, and academic researchers.”

To install it remotely, a hacker would need to infect the operating system of the user’s computer with run-of-the-mill malware, alter the hard drive’s firmware, and then delete the original, operating system-side virus. From then on, the hacker would have complete access to everything on the person’s hard disk, the exploit would be almost completely undetectable, and it would persist until the hard drive was physically destroyed.

Read the Full Article: Source – Mother Board
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-nsas-undetectable-hard-drive-hack-was-first-demonstrated-a-year-ago

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