So by now you’ve done your homework and you know how to delete your browser history. Pat yourself on the back, you’ve done well.

Except of course that there are people out there who make you and I look like absolute idiots when it comes to the laptop computer…and they are watching us.

According to Kaspersky Labs, the same guys who discovered those cyber-criminals we brought you yesterday (HERE), the US National Security Agency has hidden spying software in some of the world’s leading hard drive manufacturers. This from Reuters:

…the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.

Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.

Whilst it is obviously a flagrant violation of any number of privacy laws I think we can relax down here in that country they call Africa, I’m sure the NSA have bigger fish to fry than whatever sordid content and embarrassing YouTube tutorials you’ve been watching.

So which hard drive manufacturers did they manage to infiltrate? Reuters again:

…they could work in disk drives sold by more than a dozen companies, comprising essentially the entire market. They include Western Digital Corp, Seagate Technology Plc, Toshiba Corp, IBM, Micron Technology Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

Chill out, like I said I’m sure we’re fine. Unless, of course, you were just looking into how one makes a petrol bomb online for interest’s sake. You’re on your own now mate.

[source:reuters]