So there has been all this talk as of late with NSA and special USB cables that embed microprocessors and wireless transmitters that send out everything that passes through them.  not to mention video cables, that can do the same thing.

Apparently another favorite thing to hit is the BIOS, as you can load whatever OS on there you want, and the firmware is still active.  The best of the best must be hacking peripheral firmware.  Namely storage.

Did you know you can actually load linux onto your hard disk?  Or that various flash cards have embedded ARM processors on them?

What would this say for a network ‘offload’ mechanism to pass along packets to another host?

To those of you building “secure” systems (ie billing, medical, military) good luck.. It seems in this brave new world you cannot trust anything off the shelf.