Hardware Cyberattacks: How Worried Should You Be? How to fit hardware threats into your security model as hardware becomes smaller, faster, cheaper, and more complex. For most organizations, it's time to put modern hardware threats into perspective. This year has had its share of hardware scares. We kicked off 2018 with the Spectre and Meltdown attacks; most recently, a Bloomberg BusinessWeek report detailed how Chinese plants implanted network monitoring and control chips on motherboards made for Supermicro. Hardware technology – and, consequently, hardware attacks – have come a long way as devices have grown smaller, faster, cheaper, and more complex. Attacks that used to cost thousands of dollars can be done for a few hundred bucks or less. Now people panic when a report describes an implant the size of a grain of rice, one which is allegedly everywhere but nobody can find it.