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Comment by King-Aaron | Hacker News Reader

I can definitely entertain the possibility that Bloomberg was lying in their reporting, as like all media reports what's written should be taken with a reasonable grain of salt.

But to intentionally publish such an inflammatory article, knowing to be false, which implicates two of America's most influential corporates just seems like absolute professional suicide to me.

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The story can be false or misleading without the reporters lying. They may simply have believed their sources and chosen not to question them too closely. That's more common than reporters making things up.

There's the story about how Bloomberg pays its reporters if they "move markets".

Would that create the appropriate incentive to explain this behavior?

People are having a bit of a field day with that, but how is it any different from any other paper which gives bonuses for stories which move subscriptions? Or simply the fact that a journalist's career progress is basically pegged to the importance of their stories?

It's a niche-specific metric for rewarding the same thing every publication does - reader interest. If a reader is interested in a financial article, pretty much by definition it will alter their market behaviour.

I actually agree, as with all journalism, that there is some incentive to write exaggerated articles. But it rarely causes respectable journalists to fabricate stories, and I can't see how this would be any different.

Also the ones calling no fouls are the primary targets and would be most affected by this as one of their selling points is their security levels.

Independent 3rd party review is needed.

Hanlon's razor.

Think Three Days of the Condor. They printed it, but CIA cleaned up most of its mess, or is in frantic cleaning mode right now. Suppose Story is true, but Bloomberg mangled couple of facts, and didnt know about bigger picture.

- Chinese did in fact make firmware implants, but purely software based (no chips).

- hacks were highly targeted, aimed at Elemental (CIA drone feeds) AMAZON (aws) APPLE (iCloud).

Both denied by Apple in 2016, "Apple spokesperson has denied there was any security incident", but "miraculously" confirmed right now https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got..., admitting 2016 deny was a lie after all, but we arent lying this time, promise!

- CIA detected these attacks early and managed to inject itself into the data patch between hacked systems and China. Just imagine the power of welding such a tool. You have the ability to cut the hack at any moment you like, block certain information from leaking, INJECT your own misinformation, and most importantly you get to keep all the data being exfiltrated. Win win win win.

- and all of a sudden some stupid unpatriotic journalists spoil one of your biggest, most successful counter intelligence operations.

We still don't know what's actually happening here. There are a number of possibilities.

One is that there is some secret keeping happening. Either only a handful of people actually know and they aren't talking and the people issuing denials aren't them, or there is some kind of significant pressure from the US or China to keep this quiet and the companies are complying.

Or there could be some kind of misunderstanding. The story is half true but some details are wrong so people are looking in the wrong places or asking the wrong people. This happens sometimes with anonymous sources. You get fifteen people confirming most of the details but only one is offering the name of the company or some specific detail of the attack and that person got that detail wrong, something like that.

Or the entire story could be unadulterated crap. The problem with this one is that we can't ever be really sure it was the case, and it will be at least a couple of months without any form of hard evidence or corroboration before it makes sense for people to stop looking for it.

One other possibility -- someone wanted make China look bad and made up the whole story... and had enough resources to paint a plausible enough story that Bloomberg believed it.

This is certainly a possibility, but I would assume someone with the resources to pull this off is smart enough to realize that it would quickly be discovered if the whole thing is bs, especially as the story involves some of the US's most valuable and powerful companies.

Also, why the need to make up a false story to make China look bad? There are plenty real issues that make China look bad. Before I get accused of some anti-China bias, the same could be said of the US. If I wanted to make the US look bad I'd focus on any myriad of foreign policy or domestic concerns that show it's failings before I concocted a story that would soon be discovered to be a fabrication.

But that seems even more bizarre. Who has the resources to do that but not the resources to come up with a cleaner frame up than this? If the aim is to make China look bad, why target a US company (Supermicro) instead of a Chinese company like Huawei or Lenovo?

If the responsible party is not American (or is American but has a vendetta against America too), then why not? After all, the allegations said that some very high profile American companies were compromised from the hack, so why not involve another one?

Besides, it's more shocking if the Chinese hacked an American manufacturer rather than a Chinese one (where they would't necessarily have to "hack" anything, just compel the manufacturer to do it)

The most extraordinary part of Bloomberg’s story is that they have so many sources. How can they get 17 people to talk about something of this caliber? Especially if Apple and Amazon are constrained with gag orders to the point where they have to lie?

You don't know who's lying. And you have no way to at the moment.

Bloomberg would not be lying purposely but they might got "owned". Those corporation might have been instructed to lie, and they might have an interest to.

when I get media reports, I generally consider them 90% as true when talking vanguard reporting sites (NYT, WaPo, LATimes, WSJ, etc.). Editors are notorious for drilling down and not wanting to print unless they’re fairly confident. While papers have an incentive to publish “riviting” stories, journalists (and their editors) have a much larger incentive not to get caught with egg on their face. Take for example the reaction a few years ago from This American Life’s reaction to a false story they got (and more importantly the length of repsone they went into to correct it).

To put into context, I usually take peer reviewed reports as 95% as true (academic standards are even higher). Use those benchmarks as you will to adjust your priors.

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