Big Brother potentially exists right now in our PCs. (Intel vPRO)

[chrisj1968]

Big Brother potentially exists right now in our PCs, compliments of Intel's vPro
 

 

 

Opinion - Last week, Intel announced the third generation of its vPro Technology for business PCs. Comprised of CPU, motherboard and networking components, vPro is essentially a set of technologies which enable remote monitoring, maintenance and management in a PC. Intel bills these as tools useful for IT professionals, which they are. But shouldn't we be looking deeper into the potential threat of such technologies?
Read more at http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-opinion/39455-big-brother-potentially-exists-right-now-in-our-pcs-compliments-of-intels-vpr#Qou0v5Or2Btlp6cK.99

 

Source Link:http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-opinion/39455-big-brother-potentially-exists-right-now-in-our-pcs-compliments-of-intels-vpr

 

The old way: Remote access via OS

There have been phenomenal advancements in remote system access over the years.  These have enabled products like Microsoft's NetMeeting, a product which allow IT professionals useful access to a remote PC. IT staff can now take over a system's mouse and keyboard and operate on the system as though they were right there in front of the machine itself, even seeing what's on the user's screen. All of this occurs across a LAN or Internet connection.

Countless millions of problems have been solved this way. Still, this approach does have one major downfall. If the user's OS is corrupted or crashed, then the remote connection will only be as stable as the corruption allows. Enter vPro.


The new way: Covert remote access

Intel's preferred solution today is to have a PC equipped with an Intel Core 2-based processor, Q45 chipset and an 82567LM network chip. This combination of components allows covert remote access via something Intel calls vPro.  And, it's built right in.

This combination of hardware from Intel enables vPro access ports which operate independently of normal user operations. These include out-of-band communications (communications that exist outside of the scope of anything the machine might be doing through an OS or hypervisor), monitoring and altering of incoming and outgoing network traffic. In short, it operates covertly and snoops and potentially manipulates data.


vPro is a tool

vPro was created to be a useful tool for IT personnel. Remote access to the innards of a PC can be granted by bypassing a potentially crashed OS and any of its security and safety protocols which may or may not be operating at the time of the crash. And this new third generation just released now allows a PC user to press a few keystrokes, even in the midst a total operating system crash when not even the mouse pointer is responding. This sends a dispatch to IT indicating the user needs help. Interestingly, this also shows that the motherboard is monitoring all keystrokes all the time. But is that all vPro is doing?
Read more at http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-opinion/39455-big-brother-potentially-exists-right-now-in-our-pcs-compliments-of-intels-vpr#Qou0v5Or2Btlp6cK.99

[Growled Member]

 

In short, it operates covertly and snoops and potentially manipulates data.

 

I'm gonna get caught with my porn yet.

[Nagisan]

Sounds similar (maybe even the same thing) to the technology used in professional-grade render farms. They have a specialized network card that allows complete access to the system over the network (with proper credentials, that is) that lets you see everything from the BIOS on. As soon as you power the system on (which can be done remotely via these network cards) you get the display feed from the bios and everything that happens after, allowing you access to everything except physical access to the innards.

[Argi]

Servers already have this.  They have a card that lets you control the PC as if you were there - turn it on/off, etc...  

 

This wouldn't end up in consumer PCs.

[exotoxic]

Lots of routers you get from ISP's have remote access so they can do remote software upgrades without your knowledge or even consent Wouldn't be too hard for them to install some software that could send data back to them and since its on the router there is nothing you can do to block it.