Discovery of the Spying Chips
A surveillance chip, not much smaller than a rice grain, reportedly planted by Chinese hackers were found hidden in servers used by almost 30 American companies. According to the Bloomberg report, one of the companies included giant online shopping site Amazon, who allegedly disclosed the discovery of the spying chips to the US authorities upon hiring a third party company to evaluate the startup Elemental Technologies. The chips were reportedly seen on the server motherboards designed by US-based company Super Micro, and had been inserted during the manufacturing process all the way from China.
These claims by the Bloomberg report, however, were disputed by the companies involved through emailed statements. “It’s untrue that AWS (Amazon Web Services) knew about a supply chain compromise, an issue with malicious chips, or hardware modifications when acquiring Elemental. It’s also untrue that AWS knew about servers containing malicious chips or modifications in data centers based in China or that AWS worked with the FBI to investigate or provide data about malicious hardware,” says Amazon. Supermicro also denied the report stating, “We are not aware of any investigation regarding this topic, nor have we been contacted by any government agency in this regard.”
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You can read the full story on Bloomberg here
