Government agencies declined to comment on the report or its claims, but Bloomberg quotes several tech employees who say they were briefed by the FBI, as well as a former NASA CIO.
Intel is still a major Supermicro customer, but others appear to have shifted from them – although in the case of cloud providers, this may be more due to market realities as they have embraced low-cost ODM server manufacturers.
One cybersecurity exec, who previously worked at Cisco and Microsoft, told Bloomberg that the US Air Force briefed him about the chip.
“This wasn’t a case of a guy stealing a board and soldering a chip on in his hotel room; it was architected onto the final device,” he said, declining to reveal which company he worked for at the time.
Bloomberg alleges the US government took steps to isolate Supermicro servers from classified networks, but in many cases left them unaltered to not alert the Chinese government that they were onto them. Before showing their hand, US officials first wanted to discover what the hackers’ aims were.
Supermicro has not itself been accused of any wrongdoing. Instead, the working theory is that the Chinese government infiltrated the company, or one of its manufacturing partners, to add the chips without its knowledge.
“Bloomberg’s story, as they have characterized it to us, is a mishmash of disparate and inaccurate allegations that date back many years,” Supermicro said in a statement following the latest article.
“It draws farfetched conclusions that once again don’t withstand scrutiny. Despite Bloomberg’s allegations about supposed cyber or national security investigations that date back 10 years, Supermicro has never been contacted by the US government, or by any of our partners or customers, about these alleged investigations. Bloomberg has produced no conclusions from these alleged investigations. Nor could Bloomberg confirm to us if any alleged investigation was even ongoing. To the contrary, several of the US government agencies Bloomberg claims had initiated investigations continue to use our products and have done so for years.”
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