Hackers spent 2 years looting secrets of chipmaker NXP before being detected

If they had the decency to release some good documentation for NXP&#x27;s devices, I&#x27;m sure nobody would mind the hack.<p>I guess we figured out how one nation-state got transparency from NXP.

Two major pillars of NXP&#x27;s sales strategy are their security architecture and integration with other NXP devices (primarily connectivity ICs since the Marvell Wi-fi acquisition).<p>They are typically more expensive than competitors (Infineon, TI, ST, etc). This is due to their strategy to only compete in markets where they believe they can command a healthy profit margin.<p>Going to be a difficult strategy to maintain in a few years when there are identical products from China for 1&#x2F;2 the cost...

Ransomware attack could have been better option for NXP. It would likely be over quickly and force them to take security seriously. Now, they were bleeding industrial and trade secrets for more than a year.

Recent discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38406429">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38406429</a>

&gt; It&#x27;s likely the TA knows of specific flaws reported to NXP that can be leveraged to exploit devices the chips are embedded in, and that&#x27;s assuming they didn&#x27;t implement backdoors themselves. Over 2.5 years (at least), that&#x27;s not unrealistic.”<p>I assume these chips had backdoors long before Chinese hackers started collecting files and saving them to dropbox. Pretty convenient to be able to blame Chinese hackers for any backdoors that come to light now.

Domestic Chinese MCU company popping up with suspiciously similar part functionality to NXP&#x27;s in 3, 2, 1...

Your NXP HSM or SHE may not be as secure as you had hoped. Sigh.

Seems like what I&#x27;ve had to deal with in real life with mean people bullying me and never letting me have an actual secret.

What does &quot;several sources&quot; actually mean? Who should that exclude?

With &quot;cloud&quot; services being mentioned, they say hackers used cloud storage to evade detection, but what if the initial intrusion vector itself was planted by an AWS employee?<p>Saudis used their nationals inside Twitter quite brazenly. Imagine how many other rouge nation nationals are there being used by their governments.

&gt; A prolific espionage hacking group with ties to China<p>Lovely