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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: ggersh who wrote (148941)6/2/2019 6:49:51 PM
From: TobagoJack2 Recommendations

Recommended By
ggersh
marcher

  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217931
 
I watch much of this juncture’s (for the next several years, to 2026 / 2032) through the lens of class struggle, w/ and w/o capitals C and S

Much of the facts flow, even the fake and alt-news, and the truth filtered, can be better understood

Even the trade war can be better appreciated in light of C.S.

Onward through TeoTwawKi 2026 and towards D.I. 2032

Comment: not.priced-in, and preciously few portfolios are explicitly set up to deal w/ what is coming, that which can get awfully ugly



To: ggersh who wrote (148941)6/3/2019 1:49:15 AM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217931
 
new suspect story

If true, all it means is that Ericsson and Nokia gears are as easy to hack by team China as by anyone else

If false, all it means is that anti-Huawei axis are desperate

Either way, bullish to ultra bullish

forbes.com



Huawei: China's State Hackers 'Rigging 5G Tests' Against Nokia And Ericsson
Zak Doffman

The central theme of the U.S. case against Huawei is the company's alleged links with the Chinese state. These links include national security and intelligence collection, subsidies and soft loans, access to closed state procurements and the strong support of the state in promoting exports and defending the company's market position.

The Shenzhen telecoms giant thoroughly denies any and all such links, painting itself as fully independent of the Chinese state. But with every twist and turn in the company's battle with Washington, the Chinese state is right there by its side.

Now, a story in the Sunday Telegraph is just the latest to pose serious questions. The newspaper reports that China has been "rigging" 5G equipment testing to discredit Huawei's rivals, including Nokia and Ericsson. According to government and industry sources, "Beijing is feeding secret details of security vulnerabilities" to the testers to tip the balance in Huawei's favor. The testing encompasses "hacking techniques used to check for weak spots... vulnerabilities discovered by China’s secret state hackers have been passed to the 5G testers to ensure Nokia and Ericsson’s equipment is found to be insecure."

Huawei's security issues have always been separated into two very different areas. First, standard software and hardware vulnerabilities stemming from poor development and testing. This is the crux of a scathing British intelligence report earlier this year that seriously criticized the quality of the technology, and it is the area where Huawei has committed to a multi-billion-dollar investment program to make improvements. It is also the area where the company's rivals will have similar issues and concerns. The second area is the shadowy world of national espionage, where Huawei stands accused of either current or potential future collaboration with China's defense and spy agencies. This is where the so-called smoking gun that has not been publicly produced as yet comes in.

The 5G testing is due to complete this month and China's hope is that it can be used to inform European assessments of Huawei's suitability for 5G deployments. Ahead of the recent U.S. blacklisting of Huawei and its affiliates, it had seemed that key European markets, led by Germany, had secured a pass from Washington, where a rigorous testing regime was seen as good enough, with the U.S. publicly stating that they expected Huawei to fail such a test. The accusations of cheating would seem to be an alternative way around the problem - if Huawei is only as bad as everyone else, the argument would run, why single them out.

Huawei is a very cost-effective option for telecoms execs worldwide, essentially their products give more for less. The accusation here, of course, being that this is enabled by Chinese state subsidies. But more for less is still more for less. Huawei has also invested so heavily in R&D in recent years, that there is genuine market-leading innovation at stake. If the Chinese equipment is to be removed from networks it will lead to billions in cost and months, maybe even years in delays. It will also make negotiating terms more difficult with rivals by making the landscape much less competitive.

Beijing started a more public fight back last week, threatening to target foreign firms that adhere to the U.S. blacklist and withdraw support from Huawei, denying them access to China's vast market and industrial base. First came a proposal for enhanced cybersecurity regulation, and this was quickly followed by a blatant entity list. The common theme was that foreign entities that cut ties or disadvantaged Chinese firms for "non-technical" reasons, read politics and sanctions, would fall foul of the new rules.

It has been clear for many months, and more so after U.S. sanctions saw Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel, ARM and others pull future support for Huawei, that only action by Beijing, dove-tailing into a trade agreement compromise, can prevent Huawei from tipping into a major downward spiral.

U.S. President Donald Trump visits Britain in the coming days and will reportedly threaten to curb intelligence-sharing with its closest ally unless Huawei is cut from the country's 5G plans, both at the core and the edge. This would cause chaos for the country's networks which are just now in launch mode. It is expected that a series of "emergency" discussions between U.S. and U.K. intelligence officials will take place in the coming days to understand how to move forwards practically.

With U.S. sanctions now beginning to damage Huawei's business, the company needs all the help it can get. One had assumed this would be blatant diplomacy - the cybersecurity regulations and entity list fit that bill. The allegations of more malicious behind the scenes dealings will come as little surprise, but will not help Huawei's protestations of independence. All of which risks sending the debate all the way back to the beginning.




To: ggersh who wrote (148941)6/3/2019 1:51:02 AM
From: TobagoJack  Respond to of 217931
 
I am still waiting for the definitive followup or end-story to this below story

bloomberg.com

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.
4 October 2018, 17:00 GMT+8
In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.

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Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 8, 2018. Subscribe now.
Photographer: Victor Prado for Bloomberg Businessweek
Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.

During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.

This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.

“Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow”

There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.

One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Still, to actually accomplish a seeding attack would mean developing a deep understanding of a product’s design, manipulating components at the factory, and ensuring that the doctored devices made it through the global logistics chain to the desired location—a feat akin to throwing a stick in the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai and ensuring that it washes ashore in Seattle. “Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow,” says Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and the founder of Grand Idea Studio Inc. “Hardware is just so far off the radar, it’s almost treated like black magic.”

But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.

One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.

In emailed statements, Amazon (which announced its acquisition of Elemental in September 2015), Apple, and Supermicro disputed summaries of Bloomberg Businessweek’s reporting. “It’s untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise, an issue with malicious chips, or hardware modifications when acquiring Elemental,” Amazon wrote. “On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, ‘hardware manipulations’ or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server,” Apple wrote. “We remain unaware of any such investigation,” wrote a spokesman for Supermicro, Perry Hayes. The Chinese government didn’t directly address questions about manipulation of Supermicro servers, issuing a statement that read, in part, “Supply chain safety in cyberspace is an issue of common concern, and China is also a victim.” The FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, representing the CIA and NSA, declined to comment.

The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation. One of those officials and two people inside AWS provided extensive information on how the attack played out at Elemental and Amazon; the official and one of the insiders also described Amazon’s cooperation with the government investigation. In addition to the three Apple insiders, four of the six U.S. officials confirmed that Apple was a victim. In all, 17 people confirmed the manipulation of Supermicro’s hardware and other elements of the attacks. The sources were granted anonymity because of the sensitive, and in some cases classified, nature of the information.

One government official says China’s goal was long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks. No consumer data is known to have been stolen.

The ramifications of the attack continue to play out. The Trump administration has made computer and networking hardware, including motherboards, a focus of its latest round of trade sanctions against China, and White House officials have made it clear they think companies will begin shifting their supply chains to other countries as a result. Such a shift might assuage officials who have been warning for years about the security of the supply chain—even though they’ve never disclosed a major reason for their concerns.

How the Hack Worked, According to U.S. Officials
Illustrator: Scott Gelber

Back in 2006, three engineers in Oregon had a clever idea. Demand for mobile video was about to explode, and they predicted that broadcasters would be desperate to transform programs designed to fit TV screens into the various formats needed for viewing on smartphones, laptops, and other devices. To meet the anticipated demand, the engineers started Elemental Technologies, assembling what one former adviser to the company calls a genius team to write code that would adapt the superfast graphics chips being produced for high-end video-gaming machines. The resulting software dramatically reduced the time it took to process large video files. Elemental then loaded the software onto custom-built servers emblazoned with its leprechaun-green logos.

Elemental servers sold for as much as $100,000 each, at profit margins of as high as 70 percent, according to a former adviser to the company. Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.

Elemental also started working with American spy agencies. In 2009 the company announced a development partnership with In-Q-Tel Inc., the CIA’s investment arm, a deal that paved the way for Elemental servers to be used in national security missions across the U.S. government. Public documents, including the company’s own promotional materials, show that the servers have been used inside Department of Defense data centers to process drone and surveillance-camera footage, on Navy warships to transmit feeds of airborne missions, and inside government buildings to enable secure videoconferencing. NASA, both houses of Congress, and the Department of Homeland Security have also been customers. This portfolio made Elemental a target for foreign adversaries.

Supermicro had been an obvious choice to build Elemental’s servers. Headquartered north of San Jose’s airport, up a smoggy stretch of Interstate 880, the company was founded by Charles Liang, a Taiwanese engineer who attended graduate school in Texas and then moved west to start Supermicro with his wife in 1993. Silicon Valley was then embracing outsourcing, forging a pathway from Taiwanese, and later Chinese, factories to American consumers, and Liang added a comforting advantage: Supermicro’s motherboards would be engineered mostly in San Jose, close to the company’s biggest clients, even if the products were manufactured overseas.

Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.

The company’s pitch to customers hinges on unmatched customization, made possible by hundreds of full-time engineers and a catalog encompassing more than 600 designs. The majority of its workforce in San Jose is Taiwanese or Chinese, and Mandarin is the preferred language, with hanzi filling the whiteboards, according to six former employees. Chinese pastries are delivered every week, and many routine calls are done twice, once for English-only workers and again in Mandarin. The latter are more productive, according to people who’ve been on both. These overseas ties, especially the widespread use of Mandarin, would have made it easier for China to gain an understanding of Supermicro’s operations and potentially to infiltrate the company. (A U.S. official says the government’s probe is still examining whether spies were planted inside Supermicro or other American companies to aid the attack.)

With more than 900 customers in 100 countries by 2015, Supermicro offered inroads to a bountiful collection of sensitive targets. “Think of Supermicro as the Microsoft of the hardware world,” says a former U.S. intelligence official who’s studied Supermicro and its business model. “Attacking Supermicro motherboards is like attacking Windows. It’s like attacking the whole world.”

The security of the global technology supply chain had been compromised, even if consumers and most companies didn’t know it yet

Well before evidence of the attack surfaced inside the networks of U.S. companies, American intelligence sources were reporting that China’s spies had plans to introduce malicious microchips into the supply chain. The sources weren’t specific, according to a person familiar with the information they provided, and millions of motherboards are shipped into the U.S. annually. But in the first half of 2014, a different person briefed on high-level discussions says, intelligence officials went to the White House with something more concrete: China’s military was preparing to insert the chips into Supermicro motherboards bound for U.S. companies.

The specificity of the information was remarkable, but so were the challenges it posed. Issuing a broad warning to Supermicro’s customers could have crippled the company, a major American hardware maker, and it wasn’t clear from the intelligence whom the operation was targeting or what its ultimate aims were. Plus, without confirmation that anyone had been attacked, the FBI was limited in how it could respond. The White House requested periodic updates as information came in, the person familiar with the discussions says.

Apple made its discovery of suspicious chips inside Supermicro servers around May 2015, after detecting odd network activity and firmware problems, according to a person familiar with the timeline. Two of the senior Apple insiders say the company reported the incident to the FBI but kept details about what it had detected tightly held, even internally. Government investigators were still chasing clues on their own when Amazon made its discovery and gave them access to sabotaged hardware, according to one U.S. official. This created an invaluable opportunity for intelligence agencies and the FBI—by then running a full investigation led by its cyber- and counterintelligence teams—to see what the chips looked like and how they worked.

The chips on Elemental servers were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, according to one person who saw a detailed report prepared for Amazon by its third-party security contractor, as well as a second person who saw digital photos and X-ray images of the chips incorporated into a later report prepared by Amazon’s security team. Gray or off-white in color, they looked more like signal conditioning couplers, another common motherboard component, than microchips, and so they were unlikely to be detectable without specialized equipment. Depending on the board model, the chips varied slightly in size, suggesting that the attackers had supplied different factories with different batches.

Officials familiar with the investigation say the primary role of implants such as these is to open doors that other attackers can go through. “Hardware attacks are about access,” as one former senior official puts it. In simplified terms, the implants on Supermicro hardware manipulated the core operating instructions that tell the server what to do as data move across a motherboard, two people familiar with the chips’ operation say. This happened at a crucial moment, as small bits of the operating system were being stored in the board’s temporary memory en route to the server’s central processor, the CPU. The implant was placed on the board in a way that allowed it to effectively edit this information queue, injecting its own code or altering the order of the instructions the CPU was meant to follow. Deviously small changes could create disastrous effects.

Since the implants were small, the amount of code they contained was small as well. But they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code. The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have crashed or are turned off.

This system could let the attackers alter how the device functioned, line by line, however they wanted, leaving no one the wiser. To understand the power that would give them, take this hypothetical example: Somewhere in the Linux operating system, which runs in many servers, is code that authorizes a user by verifying a typed password against a stored encrypted one. An implanted chip can alter part of that code so the server won’t check for a password—and presto! A secure machine is open to any and all users. A chip can also steal encryption keys for secure communications, block security updates that would neutralize the attack, and open up new pathways to the internet. Should some anomaly be noticed, it would likely be cast as an unexplained oddity. “The hardware opens whatever door it wants,” says Joe FitzPatrick, founder of Hardware Security Resources LLC, a company that trains cybersecurity professionals in hardware hacking techniques.

U.S. officials had caught China experimenting with hardware tampering before, but they’d never seen anything of this scale and ambition. The security of the global technology supply chain had been compromised, even if consumers and most companies didn’t know it yet. What remained for investigators to learn was how the attackers had so thoroughly infiltrated Supermicro’s production process—and how many doors they’d opened into American targets.

Unlike software-based hacks, hardware manipulation creates a real-world trail. Components leave a wake of shipping manifests and invoices. Boards have serial numbers that trace to specific factories. To track the corrupted chips to their source, U.S. intelligence agencies began following Supermicro’s serpentine supply chain in reverse, a person briefed on evidence gathered during the probe says.

As recently as 2016, according to DigiTimes, a news site specializing in supply chain research, Supermicro had three primary manufacturers constructing its motherboards, two headquartered in Taiwan and one in Shanghai. When such suppliers are choked with big orders, they sometimes parcel out work to subcontractors. In order to get further down the trail, U.S. spy agencies drew on the prodigious tools at their disposal. They sifted through communications intercepts, tapped informants in Taiwan and China, even tracked key individuals through their phones, according to the person briefed on evidence gathered during the probe. Eventually, that person says, they traced the malicious chips to four subcontracting factories that had been building Supermicro motherboards for at least two years.

As the agents monitored interactions among Chinese officials, motherboard manufacturers, and middlemen, they glimpsed how the seeding process worked. In some cases, plant managers were approached by people who claimed to represent Supermicro or who held positions suggesting a connection to the government. The middlemen would request changes to the motherboards’ original designs, initially offering bribes in conjunction with their unusual requests. If that didn’t work, they threatened factory managers with inspections that could shut down their plants. Once arrangements were in place, the middlemen would organize delivery of the chips to the factories.

The investigators concluded that this intricate scheme was the work of a People’s Liberation Army unit specializing in hardware attacks, according to two people briefed on its activities. The existence of this group has never been revealed before, but one official says, “We’ve been tracking these guys for longer than we’d like to admit.” The unit is believed to focus on high-priority targets, including advanced commercial technology and the computers of rival militaries. In past attacks, it targeted the designs for high-performance computer chips and computing systems of large U.S. internet providers.

Provided details of Businessweek’s reporting, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a statement that said “China is a resolute defender of cybersecurity.” The ministry added that in 2011, China proposed international guarantees on hardware security along with other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security body. The statement concluded, “We hope parties make less gratuitous accusations and suspicions but conduct more constructive talk and collaboration so that we can work together in building a peaceful, safe, open, cooperative and orderly cyberspace.”

The Supermicro attack was on another order entirely from earlier episodes attributed to the PLA. It threatened to have reached a dizzying array of end users, with some vital ones in the mix. Apple, for its part, has used Supermicro hardware in its data centers sporadically for years, but the relationship intensified after 2013, when Apple acquired a startup called Topsy Labs, which created superfast technology for indexing and searching vast troves of internet content. By 2014, the startup was put to work building small data centers in or near major global cities. This project, known internally as Ledbelly, was designed to make the search function for Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, faster, according to the three senior Apple insiders.

Documents seen by Businessweek show that in 2014, Apple planned to order more than 6,000 Supermicro servers for installation in 17 locations, including Amsterdam, Chicago, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, Singapore, and Tokyo, plus 4,000 servers for its existing North Carolina and Oregon data centers. Those orders were supposed to double, to 20,000, by 2015. Ledbelly made Apple an important Supermicro customer at the exact same time the PLA was found to be manipulating the vendor’s hardware.

Project delays and early performance problems meant that around 7,000 Supermicro servers were humming in Apple’s network by the time the company’s security team found the added chips. Because Apple didn’t, according to a U.S. official, provide government investigators with access to its facilities or the tampered hardware, the extent of the attack there remained outside their view.

<img id="" src="blob:https://www.siliconinvestor.com/2b7a7c9d-f5ab-447c-aec0-d7803c5c83b1" alt="relates to The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies" data-native-src="https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iNO3klzCOEjQ/v1/-1x-1.jpg" data-img-type="image" apple-inline="yes" class="Apple-web-attachment Singleton" style="max-width: 100%; display: block; opacity: 1;">

Microchips found on altered motherboards in some cases looked like signal conditioning couplers.
Photographer: Victor Prado for Bloomberg Businessweek
American investigators eventually figured out who else had been hit. Since the implanted chips were designed to ping anonymous computers on the internet for further instructions, operatives could hack those computers to identify others who’d been affected. Although the investigators couldn’t be sure they’d found every victim, a person familiar with the U.S. probe says they ultimately concluded that the number was almost 30 companies.

That left the question of whom to notify and how. U.S. officials had been warning for years that hardware made by two Chinese telecommunications giants, Huawei Corp. and ZTE Corp., was subject to Chinese government manipulation. (Both Huawei and ZTE have said no such tampering has occurred.) But a similar public alert regarding a U.S. company was out of the question. Instead, officials reached out to a small number of important Supermicro customers. One executive of a large web-hosting company says the message he took away from the exchange was clear: Supermicro’s hardware couldn’t be trusted. “That’s been the nudge to everyone—get that crap out,” the person says.

Amazon, for its part, began acquisition talks with an Elemental competitor, but according to one person familiar with Amazon’s deliberations, it reversed course in the summer of 2015 after learning that Elemental’s board was nearing a deal with another buyer. Amazon announced its acquisition of Elemental in September 2015, in a transaction whose value one person familiar with the deal places at $350 million. Multiple sources say that Amazon intended to move Elemental’s software to AWS’s cloud, whose chips, motherboards, and servers are typically designed in-house and built by factories that Amazon contracts from directly.

A notable exception was AWS’s data centers inside China, which were filled with Supermicro-built servers, according to two people with knowledge of AWS’s operations there. Mindful of the Elemental findings, Amazon’s security team conducted its own investigation into AWS’s Beijing facilities and found altered motherboards there as well, including more sophisticated designs than they’d previously encountered. In one case, the malicious chips were thin enough that they’d been embedded between the layers of fiberglass onto which the other components were attached, according to one person who saw pictures of the chips. That generation of chips was smaller than a sharpened pencil tip, the person says. (Amazon denies that AWS knew of servers found in China containing malicious chips.)

China has long been known to monitor banks, manufacturers, and ordinary citizens on its own soil, and the main customers of AWS’s China cloud were domestic companies or foreign entities with operations there. Still, the fact that the country appeared to be conducting those operations inside Amazon’s cloud presented the company with a Gordian knot. Its security team determined that it would be difficult to quietly remove the equipment and that, even if they could devise a way, doing so would alert the attackers that the chips had been found, according to a person familiar with the company’s probe. Instead, the team developed a method of monitoring the chips. In the ensuing months, they detected brief check-in communications between the attackers and the sabotaged servers but didn’t see any attempts to remove data. That likely meant either that the attackers were saving the chips for a later operation or that they’d infiltrated other parts of the network before the monitoring began. Neither possibility was reassuring.

When in 2016 the Chinese government was about to pass a new cybersecurity law—seen by many outside the country as a pretext to give authorities wider access to sensitive data—Amazon decided to act, the person familiar with the company’s probe says. In August it transferred operational control of its Beijing data center to its local partner, Beijing Sinnet, a move the companies said was needed to comply with the incoming law. The following November, Amazon sold the entire infrastructure to Beijing Sinnet for about $300 million. The person familiar with Amazon’s probe casts the sale as a choice to “hack off the diseased limb.”

As for Apple, one of the three senior insiders says that in the summer of 2015, a few weeks after it identified the malicious chips, the company started removing all Supermicro servers from its data centers, a process Apple referred to internally as “going to zero.” Every Supermicro server, all 7,000 or so, was replaced in a matter of weeks, the senior insider says. (Apple denies that any servers were removed.) In 2016, Apple informed Supermicro that it was severing their relationship entirely—a decision a spokesman for Apple ascribed in response to Businessweek’s questions to an unrelated and relatively minor security incident.

That August, Supermicro’s CEO, Liang, revealed that the company had lost two major customers. Although he didn’t name them, one was later identified in news reports as Apple. He blamed competition, but his explanation was vague. “When customers asked for lower price, our people did not respond quickly enough,” he said on a conference call with analysts. Hayes, the Supermicro spokesman, says the company has never been notified of the existence of malicious chips on its motherboards by either customers or U.S. law enforcement.

Concurrent with the illicit chips’ discovery in 2015 and the unfolding investigation, Supermicro has been plagued by an accounting problem, which the company characterizes as an issue related to the timing of certain revenue recognition. After missing two deadlines to file quarterly and annual reports required by regulators, Supermicro was delisted from the Nasdaq on Aug. 23 of this year. It marked an extraordinary stumble for a company whose annual revenue had risen sharply in the previous four years, from a reported $1.5 billion in 2014 to a projected $3.2 billion this year.

One Friday in late September 2015, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared together at the White House for an hourlong press conference headlined by a landmark deal on cybersecurity. After months of negotiations, the U.S. had extracted from China a grand promise: It would no longer support the theft by hackers of U.S. intellectual property to benefit Chinese companies. Left out of those pronouncements, according to a person familiar with discussions among senior officials across the U.S. government, was the White House’s deep concern that China was willing to offer this concession because it was already developing far more advanced and surreptitious forms of hacking founded on its near monopoly of the technology supply chain.

In the weeks after the agreement was announced, the U.S. government quietly raised the alarm with several dozen tech executives and investors at a small, invite-only meeting in McLean, Va., organized by the Pentagon. According to someone who was present, Defense Department officials briefed the technologists on a recent attack and asked them to think about creating commercial products that could detect hardware implants. Attendees weren’t told the name of the hardware maker involved, but it was clear to at least some in the room that it was Supermicro, the person says.

The problem under discussion wasn’t just technological. It spoke to decisions made decades ago to send advanced production work to Southeast Asia. In the intervening years, low-cost Chinese manufacturing had come to underpin the business models of many of America’s largest technology companies. Early on, Apple, for instance, made many of its most sophisticated electronics domestically. Then in 1992, it closed a state-of-the-art plant for motherboard and computer assembly in Fremont, Calif., and sent much of that work overseas.

Over the decades, the security of the supply chain became an article of faith despite repeated warnings by Western officials. A belief formed that China was unlikely to jeopardize its position as workshop to the world by letting its spies meddle in its factories. That left the decision about where to build commercial systems resting largely on where capacity was greatest and cheapest. “You end up with a classic Satan’s bargain,” one former U.S. official says. “You can have less supply than you want and guarantee it’s secure, or you can have the supply you need, but there will be risk. Every organization has accepted the second proposition.”

In the three years since the briefing in McLean, no commercially viable way to detect attacks like the one on Supermicro’s motherboards has emerged—or has looked likely to emerge. Few companies have the resources of Apple and Amazon, and it took some luck even for them to spot the problem. “This stuff is at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, and there is no easy technological solution,” one of the people present in McLean says. “You have to invest in things that the world wants. You cannot invest in things that the world is not ready to accept yet.”

Bloomberg LP has been a Supermicro customer. According to a Bloomberg LP spokesperson, the company has found no evidence to suggest that it has been affected by the hardware issues raised in the article.



To: ggersh who wrote (148941)6/3/2019 1:52:25 AM
From: TobagoJack1 Recommendation

Recommended By
Arran Yuan

  Respond to of 217931
 
… and I vaguely remembered that the followup was buried because it doesn’t fit the script of Neo-cons and Neo-libs but proving to be NOT-embarrassing to deep-state, because deep-state does not embarrass at all

washingtonpost.com

Audit heightens pressure on Bloomberg over China hack story
Erik Wemple

Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, on Dec. 3 at a summit hosted by the Anti-Defamation League in New York. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)When Bloomberg Businessweek published an extraordinary story in early October about a China hardware hack, it surely expected to change the tech conversation for months to come. The headline: “ The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies.”

The impact has indeed materialized, though perhaps not the way that Bloomberg had planned. Instead of prompting, say, a new diplomatic initiative to deal with China over the hack, or an initiative by tech companies to protect themselves against foreign intrusions, or demands from consumers for reforms, the story has sustained beating after beating. Industry officials have come forward with increasingly vehement denials, while government officials have said on the record that they know nothing of the claims. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple — which was allegedly affected by the hack — demanded a retraction.

And on Tuesday, another blow: Supermicro, a San Jose-based maker of servers alleged to have been compromised in the Bloomberg story, announced the results of an audit covering issues raised in the story. “Recent reports in the media wrongly alleged that bad actors had inserted a malicious chip or other hardware on our products during our manufacturing process,” noted the company’s release, which later asserted: “After a thorough examination and a range of functional tests, the investigations firm found absolutely no evidence of malicious hardware on our motherboards.” According to Reuters, the auditing firm is Nardello & Co.

The Big Hack” claimed that operatives with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had managed to compromise Supermicro server motherboards by infiltrating subcontractors in China. This supply-chain attack, reported Bloomberg Businessweek, eventually compromised servers at Apple and at a company acquired by Amazon, not to mention dozens of other companies not identified in the story. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, also owns The Post.) Those allegations met with heated responses from the companies, which claimed they’d never seen any evidence to support the reporting. Nor did the story provide any physical evidence in the form of documents, chips or emails.

The stakes were towering, as Bloomberg Businessweek noted: “This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.”

All the denials have clearly unsettled the editorial brain trust at Bloomberg Businessweek. As this blog reported, the company dispatched reporters to continue working on the story even after it was published — an effort that was ongoing as of mid-November. “My colleagues’ story from last month (Super Micro) has sparked a lot of pushback,” wrote Bloomberg reporter Ben Elgin on Nov. 19 to an Apple employee. “I’ve been asked to join the research effort here to do more digging on this . . . and I would value hearing your thoughts (whatever they may be) and guidance, as I get my bearings.”

These reporters are doing their work from an island: More than two months after Bloomberg Businessweek’s story hit the Internet, its rivals — including the Wall Street Journal, The Post, the New York Times and a crop of ace tech sites — have failed at their attempts to follow up. According to informed sources, for example, several reporters at the New York Times tilted at the story; they failed to replicate the Bloomberg findings.

Meaning: If members of the recent Bloomberg “research effort” manage to stand up the original Oct. 4 report, they will have participated in one of the greatest journalistic comebacks ever recorded. And a whole bunch of tech executives will have a lot to answer for.

A Bloomberg spokesperson declined to comment on either the company’s reporting or on the Supermicro statement.



To: ggersh who wrote (148941)6/3/2019 1:54:46 AM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217931
 
So, any and every bit of alt-news re team Huawei is just another pawn tee-ed up willingly to do bidding of deep-state

brucebnews.com

Bloomberg And Chinese Spies: The Strangest Technology Story Of The Year


The Chinese government has put secret spy chips on US government servers. They’re stealing secrets from Apple and Amazon. And the US government is engaged in a massive effort to prevent us from learning anything about it, for unknown reasons.

Maybe.

How about this: the US government is mounting a full-court disinformation campaign, spreading lies through multiple sources to discredit China and gain an advantage in trade wars – and taking down a huge media entity as collateral damage.

Maybe.

It all starts with a magazine article.

In early October, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story that rocked the technology and cybersecurity worlds. In The Big Hack, veteran reporters Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley reported that Chinese spies had managed to insert secret chips inside motherboards used by as many as 30 US companies, including Apple and Amazon, and multiple US government agencies. The reporters alleged that the tiny chips in Supermicro motherboards would allow China to steal trade and other secrets from the US – and potentially even allow the Chinese to control the servers.

There are many unanswered questions about the article at the beginning of 2019, three months after publication. At some point we may know more about the underlying facts and the reporting that gave rise to the story. But right now, it is the most interesting technology story of 2018 (and possibly 2019) because the questions it raises are profoundly important even if the story turns out to be completely wrong.

The Story


Supermicro is a US company that uses Chinese manufacturing facilities to make highly customizable motherboards, selling over $2 billion a year of servers and motherboards to Apple, Amazon, and many other US companies and government agencies. The Bloomberg article alleges that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) quietly bribed or threatened four subcontractors to modify the design of Supermicro motherboards to include a tiny chip – smaller than a grain of rice – that would allow the PLA to take over the server or at least send information back to China.

The article goes on to describe a top-secret government investigation triggered by Amazon’s discovery of the chip in servers marketed by Elemental that used Supermicro motherboards. “Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships.”

The reporters claim that Apple independently discovered suspicious chips in Supermicro servers in May 2015. “Two of the senior Apple insiders say the company reported the incident to the FBI but kept details about what it had detected tightly held, even internally. Government investigators were still chasing clues on their own when Amazon made its discovery and gave them access to sabotaged hardware, according to one U.S. official.”

Bloomberg reached out to Apple, Amazon and Supermicro prior to publication. The companies unequivocally denied the allegations. But Bloomberg decided to publish the story anyway because it was so confident in the large number of sources who had confirmed all the details in the story over the course of a lengthy investigation. “The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation. One of those officials and two people inside AWS provided extensive information on how the attack played out at Elemental and Amazon; the official and one of the insiders also described Amazon’s cooperation with the government investigation. In addition to the three Apple insiders, four of the six U.S. officials confirmed that Apple was a victim. In all, 17 people confirmed the manipulation of Supermicro’s hardware and other elements of the attacks.”

Chinese spies with access to sensitive US and corporate data! Bloomberg knew this was a bombshell story and clearly intended to change the tech conversation in this country.

That’s not quite what happened – and that’s the interesting part.

The Reaction

The story exploded.

Super Micro lost over 40% of its value the day after publication. Apple and Amazon fiercely denied the report in public statements on the day the article appeared. Government officials denied any knowledge of the investigations described in the article. Motherboard specialists closely examined every Supermicro board in sight, trying to find the elusive extra chip. Security experts combed through the logs of every packet going in and out of large companies, looking for unexpected bits on their way to China.

No corroborating evidence turned up – no photos, no statements on or off the record, no unexplained log entries.

Bloomberg did not back down. It issued a statement that said, in part: “Bloomberg Businessweek’s investigation is the result of more than a year of reporting, during which we conducted more than 100 interviews. We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources.”

Then the heat on Bloomberg was turned up.

Apple’s denial of the claims in the story continued unabated – vociferous, detailed, and unambiguous. Tim Cook went on the record to state flatly, “There is no truth in their story about Apple. They need to do the right thing and retract it.” Apple has never previously called for the retraction of a story. Apple senior engineers have said repeatedly that everything about Apple in the Bloomberg story is completely false.

Amazon’s denials were equally clear, broad, and unambiguous, and Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy joined Apple in demanding a retraction.

Supermicro hired a third party company to audit their motherboards. Supermicro reported that the audit had found nothing whatsoever: “After a thorough examination and a range of functional tests, the investigations firm found absolutely no evidence of malicious hardware on our motherboards.”

The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security denied the report in a Senate hearing. Senior NSA cybersecurity officials denied the report.

Bloomberg has quietly been seeking additional corroboration for the story but has not publicly altered its stance. It is standing by its story.

The Mystery

There are three possibilities. Each leads to some difficult unanswered questions.

(1) The article is completely fabricated or based on such gross misunderstandings that the reporters bear all the blame.

(2) The article is true or has significant elements of truth.

(3) The article is based on accurate reporting of the information Bloomberg obtained from sources but it is nonetheless completely false.

Let’s follow each one.

Theory 1: The reporters blew it

Criticism of the article has been fierce. You can find experts who say the attack described in the article is impossible. (Others point out that hardware-based attacks are absolutely possible, even if the article’s language is imprecise.) One of the named sources in the story says the reporters presented his hypotheticals as if they were actually happening.

As time goes on, it seems more likely that something is wrong with the story. The reporters may have carried things too far and forced statements to fit their narrative. But it doesn’t sit right to dismiss the article as a work of fiction or gross negligence and stupidity.

This article wasn’t written by a couple of bloggers running amok without supervision. Bloomberg is an old-fashioned media company that does journalism, and journalism matters.

Bloomberg is a ten billion dollar company that runs a wire service, a global television network, newsletters, magazines, and websites. It has spent decades earning credibility as a news source. Bloomberg Businessweek is one of its flagship properties and is respected as a reliable source of business news and analysis. This story was clearly intended to bolster Bloomberg Businessweek’s reputation for investigative reporting.

The two reporters credited on the story did not work alone. There was almost certainly a small army of editors, executives, and committees that vetted the article before it was made the cover story of Bloomberg Businessweek. If Bloomberg is to be believed, the reporters gathered information for more than a year, including more than a hundred interviews. The reporters have been covering enterprise technology for a long time and undoubtedly consulted technical experts during the preparation of the story.

I can’t make myself believe that Bloomberg editors and reporters spun a gossamer web of conspiracies and spies and destroyed Bloomberg Businessweek’s credibility for the sake of a few clicks. (And there’s yet another possibility, which is that Bloomberg knowingly published a fake story as a willing shill for the administration. Let’s hope for the sake of our country that we’re not at that point.)

Theory 2: The article is true

Imagine that Bloomberg is onto something, and the government wants to cover it up.

There are a couple of problems with that. The biggest one: publicly traded companies don’t flatly lie in public statements. They evade. They change the subject. They find ambiguous words. But they don’t – they can’t – say things that are complete lies. That’s why it’s so interesting that Amazon and Apple both denied the story unambiguously, forcefully, in a way that left no wiggle room and no details unaddressed.

The other problem is the sheer number of different sources cited by the reporters – people in different positions at Amazon and Apple, people in several different government agencies. If the story is even remotely true, then it also potentially could be verified by others who were not sources and could comment on or off the record.

For the government to keep a lid on this story, it would have to execute a flawless cover-up, obtaining (or compelling) the silence of the leaders of the largest companies in the world as well as engineers and security officials throughout the government and multiple private companies. There is no reason to think that any administration (especially this one) could carry that off without a leak, no matter what was at stake.

If the article is true and the government is engaged in a cover-up, there must be something hugely important at stake. What national security secrets are so important that they are worth that kind of effort?

Theory 3: The sources told Bloomberg what was reported, but the sources were making it up

There’s another possibility that’s even deeper down the conspiracy rabbit hole.

Look again at the article. It’s got many specific statements attributed to specific sources: according to the reporters two senior Apple insiders said the company reported an incident to the FBI; a government official and two Amazon Web Services insiders provided extensive information about the Amazon discovery; three Apple insiders and four government officials confirmed that Apple was a target; and so on.

It seems clear that the Bloomberg reporters talked to a lot of people and they were told a lot of specific things. What if the article accurately reflects the story told to the reporters by their sources? That would require an equally flawless effort by the government to create a fabricated story and convince people in many different government agencies and private companies to be anonymous sources as Bloomberg was led along the path.

It’s unlikely. Big conspiracies almost never happen. People aren’t that good at lying and there’s always someone to spill the beans.

But is it impossible? According to a report published two weeks before the Bloomberg article, “The Trump administration is planning to launch a major, administration-wide, broadside against China. . . . The broadside – planned to be both rhetorical and substantive – will be “administration-wide,” including the White House (led by senior officials on the National Security Council), Treasury, Commerce and Defense.” Sources allegedly said that the White House would “unveil new information about China’s hostile actions against America’s public and private sectors”, including China’s activity in cyberattacks and industrial warfare.

The Trump administration has several reasons to attack China: it diverts attention from Russia; inflaming anti-China public opinion helps garner support for Trump’s trade war; and perhaps China deserves it.

In the last few months, federal officials have been arguing aggressively that China has stolen American technology through hacking and industrial espionage. We are told that China was behind the Marriott hack that was in the news last month, as well as the hack of the US Office of Personnel Management database and of Anthem Insurance in 2014. US officials have described a massive Chinese government effort to build dossiers on US citizens. You can’t buy a phone in the US made by Huawei – the second largest phone manufacturer in the world, ahead of Apple – because of intense government pressure to be afraid of devices made in China, although no specifics have ever been provided. We caused Huawei’s CFO to be arrested in Canada for no particular reason other than to escalate tension with China.

I can’t quite shake the possibility that Bloomberg was a pawn in a disinformation campaign by the US government to whip up anti-China sentiment.

Probably not! If Bloomberg had only spoken to NSA officials, say, we might be more suspicious, but the reporters talked to too many people in too many places for the government to control the whole thing without anyone coming forward now to expose the operation.

And yet, and yet . . . . I wish I felt completely confident about that.

At some point there will be some follow-up to this story. Perhaps Bloomberg will retract the story with a convincing explanation of how it made such a terrible mistake, taking a hit to its credibility and probably destroying the careers of the reporters.

Who did those reporters talk to? What did the sources say and why did they say it? If Bloomberg retracts the story, should we believe the retraction, or is it just one more step in the cover-up? Where is the truth in a world where truth is fluid?




To: ggersh who wrote (148941)6/3/2019 1:57:46 AM
From: TobagoJack2 Recommendations

Recommended By
ggersh
marcher

  Respond to of 217931
 
Mystery solved

By casual perusal of articles written by various perfectly sensible-sounding geeks

And yes, the Iranians sabotaged the Saudi tankers, and that is why the saudis are roaring to go to war on its own by its lonesome self against Iran.

Lucky for the Saudis that they did not march ahead of Bolton. Had they done so, they would have been betrayed.

Maybe we should click off our critical-thinking faculty, hold hands and believe, that god speaks to Pence, and Bolton / Pompeo are not tools, and all have sense of shame

It must be nice to be a Jetson or a Jetson lackey, for the mind would be so light

techhq.com

Huawei is not spying on you
Joe Green
'If Huawei had quantum technology, it wouldn't be shipping it in the guise of $50 microchips'
Let’s get this absolutely straight and up front: Huawei is not selling hardware that can spy on you, your company, or your government. It has not done so, nor will it, in overwhelming likelihood, ever do so.

Here are some key facts:1. Messages sent over the internet consist of tiny packets of data, represented by fluctuations in electrical current. As such they are physically detectable, not magically invisible, according to the laws of physics as we understand them.

Messages that are sending information to Beijing are detectable. If Huawei had the capability to use quantum entanglement or similar esoteric method to convey data to China, it wouldn’t be shipping such technology overseas in the guise of US$50 microchips. Taking that to a level further on, Huawei probably wouldn’t be trying to sell smartphones.

2. The only mention of Huawei’s apparent spying methods was a statement made by Bloomberg that hardware had been sold to SuperMicro and Apple that contained a chip that sent data to China. The claims were confirmed to be false by Apple, Amazon and SuperMicro.

3. There has never been any proof of the existence of any spying methods in Chinese hardware, or indeed, any equipment from anywhere in the world that contains mass-produced technology to send messages surreptitiously. The only instance of anything like that ever taking place were the Specter and Meltdown malwares, that exploited flaws in Intel’s microprocessors. Those flaws were accidental, not baked into semiconductors for any nefarious purpose.

So what is really going on?In the simplest of terms, it’s protectionism from the Chinese giant technology company, and by proxy, from Chinese companies in general.

From its commanding position in its domestic market, Huawei could dominate hardware markets all over the world – not just in smartphones, but in semiconductors, networking hardware, and of course, in 5G. In fact, the company is so far ahead in the race to make 5G a viable product, that its products are ready to put onto trucks for installation, now. Any country wishing to roll out the new fast mobile data service will have to buy Huawei hardware. Or wait for two or three years.

America and Europe are still licking their wounds from the massive decline in their automotive industries from the far east, especially Japan and South Korea. Chinese concerns already threaten whole industries like steel production, solar power, manufacturing, and now, technology. Spreading rumors and getting your buddies overseas to repeat them chimes in nicely with the general mood that predominates in politics in the West.

Whether or not the world will swallow messages that Huawei and the Chinese are threatening our way of life (by tracking what we do on Facebook) depends on several factors. But a basic understanding of technology and a broader and more considered view should go a long way to prove that we’re being duped.




To: ggersh who wrote (148941)2/12/2021 7:54:09 PM
From: TobagoJack1 Recommendation

Recommended By
ggersh

  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 217931
 
Following up to this story, for the copybook

Message 32181077



Below Bloomberg refresh article written by the same sordid sort that denigrates gold

Hilarious that Bloomberg keeps trying it on, now released for 2021 teeing up Team Biden, believing that often and regular repetition makes truth untrue, and lies true. 1984 indeed.

Predictable rehash by MSM trying to stir the pot

Remember the earlier version also championed by suspect Bloomberg, about the chip hack that never was

Now they are trying to make us believe that Team USA intelligence deliberately allowed the hack to continue so as to learn about Team China capabilities :0) A hoot.

Supermicro Hack: How China Exploited a U.S. Tech Supplier Over Years
bloomberg.com

In 2014, Intel Corp. discovered that an elite Chinese hacking group breached its network through a single server that downloaded malware from a supplier’s update site.
And in 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned multiple companies that Chinese operatives had concealed an extra chip loaded with backdoor code in one manufacturer's servers.
Each of these distinct attacks had two things in common: China and Super Micro Computer Inc., a computer hardware maker in San Jose, California. They shared one other trait; U.S. spymasters discovered the manipulations but kept them largely secret as they tried to counter each one and learn more about China’s capabilities.

I suppose next we are to believe the same USA intelligence allowed CoVid to go viral so as to learn about same Chinese capabilities.

The reviews of Bloomberg science fiction are out a lot quicker this round than last

patentlyapple.com
Twenty-eight months later and Bloomberg is back with a follow-up report titled "The Long Hack: How China Exploited a U.S. Tech Supplier." This time the report expands on their original report with a much wider view of their investigation up to 2018, without new evidence.
In context with the streaming wars now in progress, perhaps Bloomberg is trying to get a documentary deal with Netflix or other major streamer, excluding Apple TV+ due to Apple vehemently denying the story in 2018.
It could be as or more popular than the recently released documentary on Apple TV titled "The Dissident." Who doesn't like to learn about international spy agencies? There's always deniability and then discovery of half-truths and facts supporting a conspiracy. Most of these documentaries are full of holes but the storylines are always fascinatingly stitched together to produce a big question mark in your mind.
… Then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said we “ o not have any evidence that supports the article," then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats stated that "we’ve seen no evidence" of manipulation of Supermicro products, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray warned officials to "be careful what you read" about the 2018 Bloomberg claims, and Apple CEO Tim Cook said "it is 100 percent a lie, there is no truth to it" and urged Bloomberg to "do the right thing" and "retract their story."

Links to earlier versions of the same fairy tale, called it Supermicro Version 1.0, 2018 edition, essentially the same case, and proven by presentation of the government officials interviewing current and ex-government officials. Hilarious be the expression of destitution of ideas and the shamelessness of unfounded charges repeated enough times for the credulous and dumbed-down audience, all to forestall the empire’s fall.

bloomberg.com

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.


appleinsider.com
There's been a lot of smoke, but no firings. Quite the opposite. It's been a year since Bloomberg Businessweek published an extensively debunked story claiming that companies including Apple and Amazon had been hacked. Yet since then, all of Bloomberg's few responses and actions have only doubled down on how this publication lacks credibility on the topic.
The story from 2018 claimed that many firms were compromised by how they had bought servers from a company called Super Micro. Secretly embedded in the motherboards of these servers were Chinese spy chips.
If it were true, then "The Big Hack" by reporters Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley, would've been the Watergate of technology stories. It would mean that the very core of America's entire technology infrastructure had been secretly and extensively infiltrated by another nation — a nation that the US has since become embroiled in a trade dispute with that will cost American businesses and consumers literally billions of dollars.
Mind you, if it were true, there would also be proof.

medium.com
While the authors of the Bloomberg piece were working on their story for the better part of a year, the entire infosec industry has also had a year to assess the claims presented. A third-party auditor hired by Supermicro found no evidence of any tampering, and in a presentation at Chaos Communication Congress ftp.fau.de , Trammell Hudson surmised a manufacturing process probably wasn’t compromised, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t theoretically impossible.


blah blah blah

Message 32181076



Message 32181075



Message 32181074


Message 32150397