Supermicro, a world-renowned manufacturer of enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technologies debunks Bloomberg’s recent article that claims Supermicro sold enterprise-class workstation motherboards to its customers that contained a malicious chip in 2015. Supermicro refutes the allegations with is backed up by some of its large-scale clients including Apple and Amazon.
Read Bloomberg’s article entitled “The Big Hack: How China Used A Tiny Chip To Infiltrate America’s Top Companies”.
Bloomberg claims that the chip would hack into the client server’s systems to acquire data. However, Supermicro now claims it has never found such malicious chips embedded in their products nor have received reports from its clients to find such chips. Apple and Amazon have already released statements to deny Bloomberg’s claims.
Apple stated on CNBC, “We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg's reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Supermicro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple."
Steve Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer at Amazon Web Services stated, "As we shared with Bloomberg BusinessWeek multiple times over the last couple months, at no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified hardware or malicious chips in Supermicro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon systems."
Steve Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer at Amazon Web Services stated, "As we shared with Bloomberg BusinessWeek multiple times over the last couple months, at no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified hardware or malicious chips in Supermicro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon systems."
Supermicro further emphasized that it has never been contacted by any government agencies either domestic or foreign regarding the alleged claims. Supermicro assures the public and its clients that they take security claims very seriously and invests in the security capabilities of their products. The manufacture of motherboards in China is not unique to Supermicro and is a standard industry practice. Nearly all systems providers use the same contract manufacturers. Supermicro qualifies and certifies every contract manufacturer and routinely inspects their facilities and processes closely.
Source: Supermicro
