Chinese spy chips are found in hardware used by Apple, Amazon, Bloomberg says; Apple, AWS say no way

CNBC ^ | 1 hour ago | Kate Fazinni

[wally_bert]

Another good name for the evil-ware.

[Magnatron]

I was at a security conference a few months ago that had an international pavilion with vendors from around the world. The Chinese region had surveillance cameras, face recognition systems, analytics software programs. It struck me as odd that any American company would even remotely consider buying Chinese-made security and surveillance products.

[zeugma]

Any opportunity to bash Lotus Notes.

Yeah, but back when Lotus was a company, I really liked the standalone calendar that was a part of the suite. I used it for lots of things it wasn't really designed for.

[Ozark Tom]

DARPA has severed cooperative development ties with Silicon valley. Too cozy with the Chinese government, which is China manufacturing’s upper management.

[DUMBGRUNT]

Worked with an older engineer that came out of the defense industry.
He claimed that early missiles using magnetic core memory, the cores were subbed out to Taiwan bead stringers, not available in the USA.
He then claimed that the Taiwanese subbed them to the mainland.

Thusly, the missile brains were made in Red China???

[SunkenCiv]

Gosh, the Chinese? They've never exhibited the least interest in espionage and invasion of personal privacy before this. /sarc

[Swordmaker]

This headline is misleading. . . Apple was going to use the hardware in their iTunes Streaming video/movie service they were installing back in 2015-2016 order 30,000 rack mounted servers from Elemental Systems who had their servers made by Supermicro. However, even Bloomberg BusinessNews states that Apple cancelled the order when their engineers discovered the malicious IC chip on the motherboard of test units they received.

The more I think about this the less sense it makes for several very good reasons.

1. Both Amazon and Apple supposedly discovered this malicious IC chip in 2015, three years ago.
2. Nothing was said about it in any security bulletin to the industry warning about security problems with servers made in China.
3. IN THREE YEARS! Seriously?
4. Software could have been developed to disable or block transmission of the stolen data back to China since it was known. Really? The URL of the target server had to be available.
5. The revelation about this malicious chip comes from a single main stream media news source which cites only anonymous sources both in the impacted government and the two major companies, Amazon and Apple, the two largest companies in the world by market cap. Yet we hear crickets.
6. Other companies are vaguely mentioned but not by name.
7. Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro vigorously deny any such chip exists and that any such events happened.
8. Amazon acquired Elemental Systems in late 2015 and continued ordering Supermicro servers for use in their Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud and for Amazon Prime streaming video / movie service
9. AWS CEO independently said there were no spurious hardware installed in or on the Supermicro motherboards.
10. Apple did not break off doing business with Supermicro until sometime in 2016, selecting another supplier, perhaps due to the increased demand Amazon was placing on Supermicro due to growth of Amazon Prime.
11. Altering the design of a motherboard to add another chip is not an easy thing to due and must be done from engineering on. . . especially on a multilayered board.
12. None of the articles have shown this IC chip in situ on a motherboard, instead they show a photo of a generic miniature grain of wheat chip perched on a finger tip. Why not show one in situ?
13. No one has described how this tiny chip accomplishes what it accomplishes with the various scenarios a server environments that might be encountered. It just is.
14. The denial by both Apple management and Amazon management is backed by the fact that they face penalties if they are lying imposed by the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 which imposes PERSONAL fines of from $10 million to $20 million and imprisonment in a Federal institution for ten to twenty years. What incentive do these managers and officers have to lie. In Apple's case, they never even USED the products involved, cancelling the order.
15. Bloomberg has published FAKE NEWS before.

Given all that, something here doesn't smell right. . . my BS o'meter is almost pegged at 100%! —PING!

Apple Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[Swordmaker]

So are the Amazon and Apple DoD contracts are in jeopardy?

Apple, no. They cancelled their order for these servers. . . but see my ping post above. I've been thinking about this for some while. it doesn't add up. I think this is FAKE NEWS!

[Loud Mime]

Great work, Swordmaker!

[itsahoot]

I’m guessing the majority of the Apple fanbois don’t care.

Do you often hunt for threads on which you can make stupid comments?

[DuncanWaring]

You really think Apple fanbois really care about spying hardware in their phones?

[itsahoot]

You really think Apple fanbois really care about spying hardware in their phones?

Do you really believe what you are saying or do you just have your own personal beef with Apple?

Story on Drudge today says 40% of millennial men are Socialists but I doubt even these morons would not care if China or anyone else had access to their data.