[bootwoot]

The air-gap is specifically to prevent exfiltration of data. The air-gapped systems I have worked on had literally zero checking on software added to the system. But all the USB and media ports had super glue in them. An exploit that can't talk to the outside world is not terribly useful in the general case, although it's become lucrative with the rise of ransomware.

[closeparen]

Or sabotage, as in Stuxnet.

Or privilege escalation, so that an insider threat can do more damage than otherwise possible.

I don't think "it's airgapped so vulnerabilities don't matter" really holds water.

[Terry_Roll]

Stuxnet was reportedly a USB stick delivery, but this could be media speculation.

I am however interested in the low volume high frequency range sound of "static" that appears over speakers _only_ if the volume is turned up to the max in an otherwise silent office. I've had this occur on one Netherlands based website so far in the last few days, but did it come from the Netherlands based website or was it already on my system waiting for activation when visiting websites without any obvious ties back to the US?

If you didnt have your speakers on max in a silent environment, only your mobile phone would pick it up not you (if you have a mobile phone), so is this some sort of malware which can jump from one device to another like a self contained virus of sorts and is it bringing data back to base, a few bytes at a time over time?

Its a clever exploit because most people have their mobile on their desk, and if they dont have speakers some will be listening to music on their headphones so will never be alerted to the communication taking place within smartphone sound frequency ranges.

ts exploiting human behaviour and exploiting the abilities of smart phones, not your usual bit of malware.

I have also noticed Windows with all its security measures on max is able to control the bridging settings for network adaptors in VMware, which can then prevent a WMware version of Kali and wireshark from working properly in promiscuous mode, making it harder to analyse network traffic on a machine.

[eternityforest]

What's the process for legitimate code updates and the like on that kind of system? Do you take the disk out and write directly to it?

[bootwoot]

It's been a few years for me. But at the time, write anything you want to bring in to DVD-R (write-once). Including system updates, documentation, open-source libs, etc.

[xvector]

I suspect most airgapped systems aren't updated.