Comment by bflesch
5 hours ago
I appreciate the downvotes without any reasoning. It's a fact that newer Intel CPUs have Intel ME which was not in older CPUs and significantly increases attack surface if you are not living in a five eyes state.
5 hours ago
I appreciate the downvotes without any reasoning. It's a fact that newer Intel CPUs have Intel ME which was not in older CPUs and significantly increases attack surface if you are not living in a five eyes state.
In a server, you have to worry about the ME only if you also have an Intel Ethernet interface, which is connected to a potentially hostile network.
If that is not true, the ME cannot be controlled remotely.
The existence of the ME is much more worrisome in laptops, where the ME can be accessed remotely through WiFi. There, to be certain that there is no way for the ME to be accessed remotely you would have to disconnect or cut the internal antennas and use a USB dongle for WiFi.
I agree with the first part. I think this article by FSF about Intel's ME summarizes the issue https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/blogs/Intel_ME_Carikli_article_...
As for the second part, I am not sure about how living in a five eyes state would mitigate it. What do you mean by that?
As five eyes citizen you have at least some rights on paper and you can appeal to your government, but if you are foreigner these guys can go gloves off without any fear of retribution.
Try analyzing Epstein files and posting about it, they'll give you a proper penetration test of all your devices to see what you found out about their ex employee.
Nowadays even EU citizens migrating away from US cloud providers are a "national security issue".
How old are we talking?
IIRC it is pre-2008.