The more I think about this the less sense it makes for several very good reasons.
- Both Amazon and Apple supposedly discovered this malicious IC chip in 2015, three years ago.
- Nothing was said about it in any security bulletin to the industry warning about security problems with servers made in China.
- IN THREE YEARS! Seriously?
- 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.
- 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.
- Other companies are vaguely mentioned but not by name.
- Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro vigorously deny any such chip exists and that any such events happened.
- 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
- AWS CEO independently said there were no spurious hardware installed in or on the Supermicro motherboards.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- Bloomberg has published FAKE NEWS before.
Apple Ping!
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.