Hackers traditionally aim at software to sabotage systems or gain information, but a University of California, Los Angeles, researcher says hardware is now fair game as well. John Villasenor, a UCLA professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies how chips are built says companies aren’t paying attention to protecting hardware, which is not an expensive proposition. Hardware hacking was difficult until companies started outsourcing portions of the chip design. Villasenor says that a designer could build a block that functions properly until a specific function is called. Then, some sort of deviation from routine operation could be executed. Two attacks are possible: freezing the system or transmitting private data. Villasenor’s work is published in this month’s issue of the Scientific American. (International Business Times)(UCLA)(Scientific American)