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FBI Director on Whether Apple and Amazon Servers Had Chinese Spy Chips: 'Be Careful What You Read' (cnbc.com)
During a hearing in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray told senators to "be careful what you read," when asked about a recent story involving spy chips from China being secretly embedded into servers owned by Apple, Amazon and other big companies. From a report: Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the committee, asked Wray when his agency found out about the chips that server manufacturer Super Micro implanted into server hardware, as reported last week by Bloomberg Businessweek. "I would say to the newspaper article or, I mean, the magazine article, I would say be careful what you read," Wray replied. "Especially in this context." Johnson called on Wray to speak to the accuracy of the story, telling the FBI director that, "We don't want false information out there." Wray said he couldn't offer much detail because the agency has a policy of not confirming or denying that an investigation is underway. "I do want to be careful that my comment not be construed as inferring or implying, I should say, that there is an investigation," Wray said. "We take very seriously our obligation to notify victims when they've been targeted."
At least it does sound like that to me. Maybe everything we read is correct, except that the attack actually was done by the NSA?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Don't tell me or anyone else what we should and should not read.
Now, that being said, if you want to tell people to think carefully about the validity of what they read, then that's something else entirely.
What could be going on?
1) Everything is exactly as Bloomberg states and the Chinese have performed a supply line hack on American industry. - The strong denials from all public sources that might confirm this, including to the public and stockholders, would seem to indicates that a serious investigation is going on and the government is ordering everybody to deny hard if not out lie to preserve it. However, why keep it secret it the cat's out of the bag? China, and anybody involved, would already know and be taking steps to cover their tracks. Seems the proper response by law enforcement to break the news and step up public investigation ASAP.
2) Bloomberg's editors and writers are just misinterpreting whatever happened to Apple that they say was a compromised driver caught in the lab coming from a variety of sources who don't really have that good of info. - Bad stain on Bloomberg's reputation and failure of their editors to preserve the brand. Will no doubt hurt their operation when things come to light as their business is acting as a reliable source of business news.
3) The authors of the article are fabricating the article either from a collection of unrelated sources, or whole of cloth and selling it to Bloomberg, perhaps not expecting the attention it's getting. - A worse stain on Bloomberg as their editors still fell for it, but pretty much ruin for the author's careers as journalists in the future.
4) Bloomberg and the authors are in cahoots to create a fictitious story that can't be confirmed or denied in order to manipulate the markets, push international policy, and/or create fear of China. - This might actually spell doom for Bloomberg, or might not. There are plenty of "news sources" that could get away with such things and nobody would even blink if it was proved to be true. Perhaps Bloomberg thinks they can get sales and get away with it at the same time. I'm sure some people have played harder and faster with more on the line and the end result would depend on how trustworthy the public actually takes Bloomberg to be to begin with. It would also probably be straying into legal territory it it turned out toe be manufactured, cause the people involved to lose their jobs, and maybe do jail time.
4)Somebody has manufactured the story and fed it to Bloomberg's authors in order to manipulate the markets, push international policy, create fear of China, hurt Bloomberg's reputation, or any combination of these. - Now we're practically back into spook territory. There are certainly people who would like to do any number of things, but to have the scale to do beyond simply option #2 would take resources and also probably venture into legal territory for acting against Bloomberg, the companies involved, China, etc.
What the fuck are you talking about? There's no credible information the Chinese did squat with those boards the way it's been reported. They may be up to other things but that's not what is being claimed.
This same guy and [others in the US "intelligence community"] have been able to do the same thing w... for over a decade and a half
Quite. They can, and do, do everything this alleged hardware hack is alleged to enable, and more. Since Snowden that's solidly on the public record, manuals and all. Since the Shadow Brokers, lots of others have been able to do some of it and/or see how it works.
Seems to me they are trying to tone down the outrage - because if it really gets going, it might (finally) be turned on them.
What's the big deal if the Chinese came up with the capability, but had to put a chip on the boards to make it happen, rather than get Intel and AMD build it into their own chip sets?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't know if these "magic" chips are installed or not.. buuut..
If they were, you'd think that someone would have noticed the extra traffic on their network going through, or trying to get through, their firewalls. Unless these chips are packed with every known vulnerability of bypassing corporate firewalls, they would leave a very suspicious trail of evidence to their use.
Prince Charming: You! You can't lie! So tell me puppet... where... is... Shrek?
...do or do not know where he shouldn't probably be, if that indeed wasn't where he isn't. Even if he wasn't at where I knew he was
Pinocchio: Uh. Hmm, well, uh, I don't know where he's not
Prince Charming: You're telling me you don't know where Shrek is?
Pinocchio: It wouldn't be inaccurate to assume that I couldn't exactly not say that it is or isn't almost partially incorrect.
Prince Charming: So you do know where he is!
Pinocchio: On the contrary. I'm possibly more or less not definitely rejecting the idea that in no way with any amount of uncertainty that I undeniably
Prince Charming: Stop it!
Pinocchio:
[Pigs and Gingerbread Man begin singing]
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The part that got me about the article was that there were no pictures of actual compromised motherboards.
Supposedly they were sold by the thousand, and the IT crews pulled them all out and replaced them. No one thought to keep one?
Or there isn't one still lying on some shelf somewhere?
Reeses