There is continuing controversy as to whether the claims that certain motherboards manufactured in China were fitted with tiny microchips that are capable of compromising data. Details as to what exactly this means is less important than the answers to “what if” questions. The chip could potentially install malware or open up a port silently for the hackers to invade any of the systems using such a motherboard. It could also potentially inflict other major damages such as erasing all data or corrupt the data slowly (in some intelligent ways) so that even backups over a period of time makes it impossible to retrieve the data. And it may be programmed to be dormant and wake up in some future date. Who knows?

Planting such “easter eggs” is a common practice in software, but not necessarily with the intent of causing damage, but more as a joke or for fun. Programmers of video games or computer software planted these for fun. For example, TECO editor from TOPS-10 operating system (in the late 70s and early 80’s) used the command make to create a file. If you typed “make love” to create a file called love, it had an easter egg which would respond by saying “not war?“. Most recently, Google engineers have been creating a fair amount of easter eggs.

I want to tell you a story about my question on this subject some 8 years ago…

(more…)