Hackers reverse-engineer NSA's leaked bugging devices

[Fish]

Originally Posted by planetdoc

Thats the difference between monitoring/keylogging vs getting what is already in the machine (what is typed and seen might not be in there).



It sounds like they say that i2c is a path that malware can travel from their bug to execution (either gpu or something else). The bugs described are about monitoring/keylogging from hardware without modifying the software environment.

No, there is absolutely no way malware could infect a computer through I2C. I2C lets you probe known outputs from the rest of the bus. Meaning that another piece of hardware has to be hard wired to output wanted information to a specific pin. It can only access info that other hardware natively shares. It's incredibly limited in both speed and available bits to work with. It doesn't have the capability to do much else, especially anything software or OS related.

Yes, most of the bugs described are about monitoring a computer which relies on access to the machine. It's pointless and has nothing to do with the NSA.