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I ran across this article from last year again and it got me thinking. The article is a story about how a hardware hacker was able to hack hard drive firmware, first to upload his own firmware, but also to take advantage of the embedded controller, and even install linux on the controller. If you haven't read it it's fairly impressive. [Ed's Comment: I would go further and say that it is a amazing piece of hacking, in the traditional meaning of the word.]
It seems that lately there have been a lot of vulnerabilities targeting embedded peripherals. Those in the article come to mind, also badUSB, and some IPMI vulnerabilities.
What do you think? Are the number of attack vectors targeting embedded peripherals a consequence of more powerful controllers? Worse software? More sophisticated attackers? Or just a random occurrence?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 29 2014, @09:24PM
You could also reuse the spare sectors (used by the drive as replacement if regular sectors fail) for storing such test writes. Then it would even survive a power cycle, provided the written data doesn't exceed the spare sector capacity.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.