You are aware that a journalist's scope of duties doesn't cover providing script kiddies with free 0day exploits?

Wouldn't like to see what would happen if skiddies got hold of this crap, although anti-virus / firewalls being insecure is nothing new... remember what happened with OptixPro years ago...

Inheresting article
Has by chance anyone anywhere proved what the guy says?
I'm not too much into kernel debugging, but if there was a solid old fashion kernel debugger, was it able to reveal and analyze the malicious blocks?
I remark that Intel Management Engine is being present on all intel Core powered devices...maybe another reason why not to upgrade to Windows 10.

Curious what these government hackers/coders annual base salary is/was.

I don't think that's true, knowing typical 4chan it's just mild trolling, I don't think anyone dumping this kind of info would go about so much detail about how they got to know said information, it's extremely identifying. And intel ME isn't what it's chalked up to be, you can even remove most of it without much effect. https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner it's a bit crude but it wipes most of ME (except the init parts) out.

Intel ME is in all processors intel makes and can interface with any OS you install since it's operating under it's own OS and can read the memory and the registers as well as has it's own network stack.

There was a great talk about exploiting intel ME a REcon https://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf .

In all fairness I should add that AMD processors also have similar capabilities through a thing called AMD Platform Security Processor, it's basically the same idea, it runs off of a tiny ARM chip and let's the CPU's core out of RESET state on boot, so you can't really get rid of it afaik.