Bloomberg still has not retracted their spy chip story (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...).
Until then, I would take anything you read in Bloomberg w/ a grain of salt.
Until then, I would take anything you read in Bloomberg w/ a grain of salt.
If the story is that a small handful of motherboards that were destined to be shipped to cloud providers from Supermicro had some remote monitoring / control capabilities (of varying types opportunistically applied) added to them at the behest of the Chinese government that sounds completely plausible and incredibly hard to verify and/or defend against.
I say plausible as we know that US intelligence agencies have conducted similar actions:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
And that's without even direct access to the manufacturing floor (as in the Supermicro case).
If they're unable to determine the veracity of the story, they should retract it. If they're convinced of some elements of the story but not others, they should say so.
The failure to follow up with either affirmation or retraction seems dishonest.
I ask, because it is quite plausible to have something like this planted, considering that majority of electronics is produced in one country.
Also take into account the fact that when the story first broke, people were quick to point to past reports by the same journalists that are provably false but never retracted.
Btw, last I heard about this story, it was said (IIRC) that Bloomberg assigned different journalists to re-investigate it. Did anything ever come of it?