That Bloomberg Supply-Chain-Hack Story
Full article142 words · extracted from schneier.com · click to collapse
Back in October, Bloomberg reported that China has managed to install backdoors into server equipment that ended up in networks belonging to—among others—Apple and Amazon. Pretty much everybody has denied it (including the US DHS and the UK NCSC). Bloomberg has stood by its story—and is still standing by it.
I don’t think it’s real. Yes, it’s plausible. But first of all, if someone actually surreptitiously put malicious chips onto motherboards en masse, we would have seen a photo of the alleged chip already. And second, there are easier, more effective, and less obvious ways of adding backdoors to networking equipment.
EDITED TO ADD (12/17): SuperMicro now denies it.
Tags: backdoors, China, DHS, hacking, hardware, supply chain
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
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