The Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor have been built into every Intel and AMD processor manufactured in recent history.
They are pitched as a way to remotely manage and administrate machines that they're running on, but in practice represent an enormous security risk and are functionally just a commercial backdoor. They cannot be disabled, and in many cases are actually vital to the functioning of the CPU. The firmware that runs on them is entirely proprietary, preventing security researchers from properly studying them.
All of this combined makes them an incredibly enticing target for hackers, who have, in fact, found extremely serious vulnerabilities in both products many times in the past. Access to the ME/PSP grants total control over every function of the system. This prospect is made all the more worrying - or attractive, for prospective attackers - by the fact that the ME/PSP is always running as long as the system is connected to a power source. if the switch on your desktop's power supply is on, or if your laptop battery is holding a charge, the ME/PSP is running, and therefore exploitable.
The fact that the ME/PSP is capable of doing basically anything makes it even more potentially vulnerable. It can connect to networks, and by extension the greater internet. This exposes it to an immense attack surface, and vastly increases the potential damage of any malicious payload installed on them. There is no way to disable this behaviour. You are given no practical way to shrink the potential attack surface of the ME/PSP. The vast majority of users are not even aware of this "feature," and of those that are, another vast majority will never have any use for such a thing.
The fact that this "feature," which is only of any theoretical value to large organizations with IT departments, is baked into even the lowest-end bargain bin consumer grade processors, enabled by default, and uncontrollable in any meaningful way by the vast majority of users1, I find rather suspicious. I'm not going to jump the gun and say that the NSA or CIA did it, it very well could just be laziness or cost-cutting on the part of the engineering or manufacturing departments - but the presence of such an enormous and unmitigatable backdoor on every modern computer is awfully convenient for state intelligence agencies, no?
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most motherboard BIOSes don't even make any mention of the presence of the ME/PSP, let alone provide any options to configure it.
