US Warns Hidden Radios May Be Embedded In Solar-Powered Highway Infrastructure (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0179148154
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/10/222243/us-warns-hidden-radios-may-be-embedded-in-solar-powered-highway-infrastructure
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-warns-hidden-radios-may-be-embedded-solar-powered-highway-infrastructure-2025-09-10/
> The advisory, disseminated late last month by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration, comes amid escalating government action over the presence of Chinese technology in America's transportation infrastructure. The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered "in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS," referring to battery management systems.
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> The note, which has not previously been reported, did not specify where the products containing undocumented equipment had been imported from, but many inverters are made in China. There is increasing concern from U.S. officials that the devices, along with the electronic systems that manage rechargeable batteries, could be seeded with rogue communications components that would allow them to be remotely tampered with on Beijing's orders. [...]
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> The August 20 advisory said the devices were used to power a range of U.S. highway infrastructure, including signs, traffic cameras, weather stations, solar-powered visitor areas and warehouses, and electric vehicle chargers. The risks it cited included simultaneous outages and surreptitious theft of data. The alert suggested that relevant authorities inventory inverters across the U.S. highway system, scan devices with spectrum analysis technology to detect any unexpected communications, disable or remove any undocumented radios, and make sure their networks were properly segmented.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-warns-hidden-radios-may-be-embedded-solar-powered-highway-infrastructure-2025-09-10/
Oh, solar *infrastructure* (Score:2)
For a second there I thought this was going to be about that terrible solar freakin' roadways idea again. God that was stupid.
Duplicate story (Again) (Score:2)
This was already reported and discussed on Slashdot in May.
[1]https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
- Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar inverters
- Undocumented cellular radios also found in Chinese batteries
- U.S. says continually assesses risk with emerging technology
- U.S. working to integrate 'trusted equipment' into the grid
[1] https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/14/1655244/rogue-communication-devices-found-in-chinese-solar-power-inverters
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the radios were discovered and discussed long ago, but THIS story is not a duplicate.
A new announcement was made by the government. (to distract us from some totally-fake-hoax-thing..)
Maybe. So? (Score:1)
Embedding "hidden radios" does absolutely nothing unless there are SIM cards in there. They are not a backdoor into the equipment. They cannot be called or contacted.
Seriously. Details matter.
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good thing they said they were cellular radios and not "low power two-way satellite radios.
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> good thing they said they were cellular radios and not "low power two-way satellite radios.
Right, because as Abraham Lincoln said we are to believe everything we read on the internet.
I don't know what kind of hardware was discovered, only that it is likely correct that the hardware is not likely on a cellular phone network for lack of a SIM (physical or electronic) so as to have a phone number to take calls or to call anything but the local e911 dispatch. There's other reasons to believe that the boxes don't contain cellular phone radios like we'd expect the term defined. The reporting could be
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BE AFRAID!! BE VERY AFRAID!!
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> Embedding "hidden radios" does absolutely nothing unless there are SIM cards in there. They are not a backdoor into the equipment. They cannot be called or contacted.
> Seriously. Details matter.
I haven't seen a physical SIM card in 5 years, everything I own uses eSIM now.
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> Embedding "hidden radios" does absolutely nothing unless there are SIM cards in there. They are not a backdoor into the equipment. They cannot be called or contacted.
> Seriously. Details matter.
Hidden radios are already out-of-the-box thinking, so it's not a huge stretch to imagine this thing paired with more out-of-the-box ideas. For example, phones compromised with malware are not an uncommon thing. If some small but significant percentage of phones are injected with malware that is complementary, the hidden radios could piggyback via the phones to communicate back home, sort of like how AirTags work. Sounds a bit far-fetched, but so are hidden radios.
That explains it (Score:1)
I've been wondering why my car's radio keeps picking up Chinese language stations.
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Far from a MAGA voter, but there were exploding pagers not long ago...
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Pagers that were enrolled into legitimate networks and are specifically designed to receive signals from anyone. That is a bit different to what is described here.
Without a SIM card, these "hidden radios" cannot get called or contacted except by the local network operators. "China" can certainly not do it.
Re: Jesus fucking Christ (Score:2)
What if they, just for example, [1]flew a cheap radio transceiver overhead with a balloon [wikipedia.org]. Or a swarm of them?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident
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I guess you have no clue what the power requirements for a cell tower are. And what the range and life-expectancy of such a balloon is.
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> Without a SIM card, these "hidden radios" cannot get called or contacted except by the local network operators. "China" can certainly not do it.
Did you miss the story earlier today? [1]iPhone 17 Air Drops Physical SIM Slot Globally, Pushing eSIM-Only Future [slashdot.org] said in the summary that 75% of phone connections are going to be eSIM by 2030. Just because a cellular device doesn't have a physical SIM card doesn't mean they can't communicate. This will make it harder to identify hardware that has undocumented cellular components, you will have to identify the actual components instead of just going "WTF is a SIM slot doing there?". It will be almost impo
[1] https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/25/09/10/1935204/iphone-17-air-drops-physical-sim-slot-globally-pushing-esim-only-future
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Who said it has to be based on commercial cell technology? Design the radio to talk to satellites you control, like when [1]the U.S. bugged China's equivalent of Air Force One [seattlepi.com].
[1] https://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/jiang-s-767-reportedly-bugged-1077879.php
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And and everyone knows, SIM cards are incredibly difficult to get hold of, especially if you're a government that can just order its telecoms to do anything it wants them to do. I mean, they're so small!
Are you talking about the Israel thing? (Score:2)
Because that was a multi-year operation from mossad for fuck sakes.
I don't know if anything else.
I mean yeah having our entire supply chain completely dependent on China who we are setting up his hour new Cold war buddy probably isn't the best thing in the world but the only way to get off that addiction train is trillions of dollars of government spending that's just not going to happen. Those trillions are already earmarked for about 1,000 American billionaires...
And besides it's not like we a
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Seems legit to me
[1]https://www.reuters.com/sustai... [reuters.com]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/
Re: Jesus fucking Christ (Score:2)
Echoing the others' sentiments. Exploding pagers. Compromised cellular network hardware. Supply chain attacks like this are exactly the sort of thing on nation state actors' playlists.
Entirely plausible (Score:1)
And anyone who has ever used a $2 ESP32 microcontroller should know just how plausible this could be...
Those things are scarily powerful for their price (likely a dumping strategy) and could quite easily embed a BLE or WiFi backdoor into anything from a disposable vape (which contains a microphone for your puffing convenience of course) to a car to an industrial robot, and so I would not be at all surprised to find them in Solar inverters.
Quite frankly, with its roughly 1MB of obfuscated/encrypted ROM, and
Critical thinking would be nice (Score:2)
So stop and think for a moment why an administration obsessed with slowing or stopping the transition to wind and solar would bring this up now in this context.
Trump is not going to help prevent any sort of supply chain attack. And frankly there isn't going to be one.
Like the man said it's a big club and you ain't in it. There's about 2,000 billionaires in this world and they aren't American and they aren't Chinese and they aren't French or German or anything else. They are billionaires.
And they
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These are likely for management systems. Standalone devices are very difficult to manage and monitor, and if you don't even have power cables to it they're even harder. China is expanding its infrastructure at a truly phenomenal rate, and unlike the US they appear to be planning for the long term. Corporations here will throw things out in the field willy-nilly with no consideration of how the customer will manage this equipment in the future, that would not be tolerated in China. If it can't be managed