Both US and UK intelligence officials have put out statements over the weekend in support of Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro in regards to recent allegations made by Bloomberg in an article published last week.
On Thursday, Bloomberg reporters claimed that Chinese intelligence had secretly implanted spy chips inside motherboards used for Supermicro servers that eventually made their way inside the IT infrastructure of Apple, Amazon, and 30 other companies, but also inside the networks of US and UK governments.
The report shocked the public and cut Supermicro's stock value in half.
All three major companies named in the piece vehemently denied the Bloomberg report's claims.
Amazon cited "so many inaccuracies [...] that they're hard to count."
Apple suggested Bloomberg's sources "might be wrong or misinformed," and they might be "confusing their story with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of [the Apple] labs."
Supermicro, too, denied the Bloomberg report, with the company saying they have "never been contacted by any government agencies either domestic or foreign regarding the alleged claims."
In its report, Bloomberg cited 17 unnamed sources from the intelligence and private sector.
But in its statement, Apple said that "no one from Apple ever reached out to the FBI about anything like this, and we have never heard from the FBI about an investigation of this kind -- much less tried to restrict it."
Over the past few days, several security researchers and infosec pundits have torn the Bloomberg article to pieces, criticizing everything from the incorrect artwork to the lack of technical details or the reporters' ability to convince sources to go on the record with their real names. Despite all this, Bloomberg stood by its reporting.
zdnet.com
