Chapter 28
Sunday, January 24
New York City Times
HARDWARE VIRUSES: A NEW TWIST
By Scott Mason
In conversations with the Spook, the man who claims to be the technical genius behind the Homosoto Invasion, I have learned that there are even more menacing types of computer viruses than those commonly associated with infected software programs. They are hardware viruses; viruses built right into the electronics. The underground computer culture calls the elite designers of hardware viruses Chippers. It should come as no surprise then that Chipping was a practice exploited by Homosoto and his band under the wizardry of the Spook.
Chippers are a very specialized group of what I would have once called hackers, but whom now many refer to as terrorists. They design and build integrated circuits, chips, the brains of toys and computers, to purposefully malfunction. The chips are de- signed to either simply stop working, cause intentional random or persistent errors and even cause physical damage to other elec- tronic circuits.
You ask, is all of this really possible? Yes, it is possible, it is occurring right now, and there is good reason to suspect that huge numbers of electronic VCR's, cameras, microwaves, clock radios and military systems are a disaster waiting to happen.
It takes a great many resources to build a chip - millions of dollars in sophisticated test equipment, lasers, clean rooms, electron beam microscopes and dozens of PhD's in dozens of disci- plines to run it all.
According to the Spook, OSO Industries built millions upon millions of integrated circuits that are programmed to fail. He said, "I personally headed up that portion of the engineering design team. The techniques for building and disguising a Trojan Chip were all mine. I originally suggested the idea in jest, saying that if someone really wanted to cause damage, that's what they would do. Homosoto didn't even blink at the cost. Twelve million dollars."
When asked if he knew when the chips would start failing he responded, "I don't know the exact dates because anyone could easily add or change a date or event trigger. But I would guess that based upon timing of the other parts of the plan, seemingly isolated electronic systems will begin to fail in the next few months. But, that's only a guess."
The most damaging types of Trojan Chips are those that already have a lot of room for memory. The Spook described how mostly static RAM, (Random Access Memory) chips and various ROM chips, (Read Only Memory) such as UV-EPROM and EEPROM were used to house the destructive instructions for later release in computer sys- tems.