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Amazon Offloaded Its Chinese Server Business Because it Was Compromised, Report Says (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: It looks like Amazon's move to sell off its physical server business in China last year was because the unit had been compromised by a Chinese government spying program. That's according to a report from Bloomberg which details how the Chinese government infiltrated a number of U.S. companies by sneaking tiny chips onto motherboards from Supermicro. They then became part of servers deployed by the companies giving remote operatives potential access to data. It's a huge story that includes a comparatively small but important passage shedding light on Amazon's China deal last November -- the U.S. firm sold the physical server business to local partner Beijing Sinnet for 2 billion yuan, or around $300 million. That transaction initially sparked reports that AWS would exit China, but Amazon later clarified it planned to continue to operate its cloud services in China. Selling the physical server business, it said, was down to the fact that "Chinese law forbids non-Chinese companies from owning or operating certain technology for the provision of cloud services." While it is correct that China did introduce cybersecurity laws that placed restrictions on overseas firms and appeared to give the government unprecedented access to data, the Bloomberg report claims that Amazon's China-based servers were in fact offloaded because they were plagued with compromised servers.
Wasn't it confirmed by the Snowden leaks that Uncle Sam intercepts hardware during shipment to be compromised?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
And you believe China is the only country doing this type of hardware hacking (or any hack for that matter)? Like the three letter agencies have so much integrity that they would never ever do such a thing? Did you ever wonder whether it was those very agencies that did it in the first place and if caught, they would have plausible deniability as well as being able to put the blame on China? As Trump once said "you think our country is so innocent?" Think outside the box a little and don't believe everything you read. The people at Bloomberg know every intimate detail of this hack, but they can never get to the bottom of who actually did the hack even though it would be so easy to follow the supply chain back directly to the attacker, but they would never go so far. Why? Because this story leads right back to those three letter agencies right here in the US of A. If caught, just blame China for it. Just because it was built in China doesn't mean they are the only ones to place blame. I'm surprised they didn't blame Russia for it. Now China and Russia are the boogie men.