Granted, hypothetical discussions are interesting but this is a problem that needs to be solved now.

True. Which gets us back to the issue of “why?” The Chinese government has good reason not to do that, unless it is war.

If it is war, then disk drives might play a part. Yet who better than China to mount a massive cyber-attack on the Internet infrastructure of the Western world? That is a much more obvious vulnerability.

Robin

Everyone with sensitive data and Seagate drives would have to insure that none of their drives were infected. That would be an enormous effort and cost a whole bunch of money. Meanwhile we’d be stuck with thousands or millions of suspect computers, some of which will undoubtedly be performing critical jobs..

This may not be a deliberate move in the Chinese information war, but it’s extremely troubling nonetheless. Prudent vendors may have to start checking every single drive before they install it.

China’s export-led growth militates against such an act of war against major trading partners, such as the US, Japan and Europe, unless things got really crazy. Industrial espionage is much more valuable to the Chinese economy, just as it was to the 19th century US economy.

To mount such an attack, the Chinese government would have to ship millions of drives with a hidden logic bomb trusting that no one would find it. Then it would have to get a message to all those drives telling them to attack unless they were on a timer.

How likely is that?

There are much more obvious ways to take out the Internet for a few weeks. Using disk drives would be too much trouble with too great a risk of detection. Engineers who qualify disk drives are pretty smart and use a lot of different tests to discover drive firmware bugs. I wouldn’t want to be the bright guy who told the leadership that a disk drive logic bomb could be hidden for a few years.

Robin

From a tactical information warfare viewpoint, the Chinese government may gain more by simultaneously blue screening that country’s commerce and defense capabilities and overloading their networks than by data gathering.

Data warfare is as much about preventing access to important information as gaining it.