Notes for season 2 episode 19, “Trojan Horse“
03:59 Monica refers to “hex cores” when discussing the fictional tablet CPU. This is usually “hexa-core” (ie a CPU with 6 cores).
04:39 The executive has strong opinions about New York pastries. (Not a fan of Parisian macarons?) From the context, it feels like Rylatech or Censatek are analogous to router companies like Cisco or Juniper.
08:25 We get a brief look at a slightly more scifi looking movieOS interface, as files are copied to a USB stick. Monica clearly didn’t unmount the USB stick before pulling it out, though.
11:22 I would make a joke about Mac keyboard reliability, but this episode aired in April 2013, and the notorious “Butterfly” keyboard was introduced in 2015. And while the faulty keyboard initially looks like an Apple A1243, on closer inspection it’s probably an AliExpress knock-off.
18:37 Monica’s online groupware (calendars, address book, call log, emails) gets backfilled with fictitious entries to frame her for corporate espionage.
25:14 Shaw assumes that if she was given a phone number, then that’s an invitation to just show up in person unannounced. Which, in the dating world, is considered a red flag.
27:50 I think this is the first time we see the reoccurring safe house location. I don’t know that it gets a name, but I think of it as “The Tower”, due to it being clearly high up, and containing a framed photo of Tower Bridge, and a French clock tower face (Devrine Bray-Sur-Seine).
29:25 Monica “Disabled the portmapper”. Quite reasonable, there’s usually no reason to expose the RPC portmapper (and the UDP listener is a potential DDoS amplifier). It’s 2013, you probably don’t need to expose “FTP and SNMP”.
30:17 The “server firewall” looks suspiciously like a home router web config page.
30:39 Finch gets “hacked back”, and the hack causes his laptop to explode.
It’s hyperbolic, but it’s not total nonsense. The batteries in tech laptops can experience a “thermal runaway” process which can lead to fire or explosion. The sort of things that trigger a thermal runaway, such as overcharging, or rapid charging, are regulated by a BMS (battery management system). In theory malicious firmware could be written to a BMS to remove these safeguards.
The sequence was probably inspired by the “hackers can cause your laptop to explode” reporting of Charlie Miller’s 2011 research into hacking MacBook batteries.
31:21 It’s not really clear how the “locator chip” on the employee badge works. It’s a thin credit-card form, so not a transmitter. So is the building just constantly sending out RF energy pulses?
32:07 I think “catalogue server” is Windows Active Directory terminology.
32:31 To demonstrate the unusual network traffic the production team have modified an RRDTool graph, but animated it in a way that’s illegible.
32:45 Add ANON81X8.COM to the Warners domain pool. I imagine this represents some service akin to ProtonMail – but ProtonMail itself didn’t exist when this episode aired. Also, an anonymous email system where people use their full legal names in the email addresses? Opsec fail.
32:57 Some of the sensitive systems listed have their domain labels in the wrong order, like “doj.ftp.gov“.
So the twist is that, it’s not that the Chinese are spying on Rylatech, it’s that Rylatech is being paid to back-door its customers on behalf of “the Chinese”. (As opposed to putting in backdoors to facilitate access to their clients by the US government?)
Ah, governments simultaneously demanding that network and application designers put in back doors for governments (for law enforcement, safety, unacknowledged AI-driven mass surveillance based assassination programs) but then freaking out that other, foreign, governments can do the same.
34:10 “They’re communicating on an internal sms network.” It’s called Slack? Actually Slack wouldn’t be introduced until later in 2013, but HipChat existed at this point.
35:44 If there’s one thing I can’t get enough of, it’s a character delivering an “information is the real power” speech while pointing a gun at someone.
40:51 Announcements that government will be replacing all the products suspected to have backdoors, with other products which… might not? Who knows?
43:23 Having Greer use a Huawei M835 at this point feels a bit on the nose.