Amazon urges Bloomberg to abandon high-profile claims in an article about Chinese spyware modules in servers

Andy Yassi, CEO of Amazon Web Services urged Bloomberg to reject statements made in a previously published article. It is worth recalling that it was about Chinese modules located in the server equipment. “They did not provide evidence, the plot continues to change, plus there is no reaction to external factors,” said Jesse.

He believes that Bloomberg should take responsibility and reject the loud statements from the article. Earlier about the same said Apple CEO Tim Cook. He stated that what was described in the Bloomberg article never happened, the information must be refuted.


As for the article itself, it describes the Chinese spy microchip, which is installed on the motherboards of the Supermicro servers. This chip supposedly allows the Chinese to get almost any information that the server itself uses with a hardware backdoor.
')
Almost immediately after the release of the material, the head of Apple wrote a response statement, which refers to the disagreement with the information contained in the article. According to Cook, this whole story is fiction, since the servers are under the reliable protection of the company's specialists and nothing like them can be. Cook also said that the server hardware was checked repeatedly, including several months before a controversial article appeared in Bloomberg.

The corporation could not detect any chips, quite possibly because they did not exist. “We were never tested or warned by representatives of the FBI about this danger,” Cook said. In addition, the corporation said that the FBI agents did not apply even after the entire article was made public. And the security services would be the first to pay attention to such an incident, which threatens the national security of the country.

As for Amazon, it is not the first time when Amazon is trying to refute the claims of Bloomberg journalists about Chinese digital surveillance of data that is transmitted and processed using servers developed by SuperMicro.

Initially, experts stated the complete absence of evidence. But soon it appeared, however, somewhat different in form from what was reported by Bloomberg journalists. The fact that spyware does exist, said one of the leaders of the company Sepio System, which specializes in the security of hardware solutions. Recently, this company fulfilled the order of one of the major clients (whom it was not yet possible to establish). The client wanted to know how many vulnerabilities exist in his equipment and software and how to get rid of them.

According to Yossi Applebaum, the head of the company, there are no problems in detecting problems in the server hardware. His company managed to detect more than one spyware module. According to Applebaum, the vulnerability is being introduced even in production - perhaps a factory where the company's servers are manufactured and completed. The power of Supermicro is quite large, and the object itself is located about a hundred kilometers from ton Shenzhen.

Unfortunately, the experts have not been able to fully understand what kind of data the infected hardware is transmitting or processing. It is also unknown whether the telecommunications company that hired Applebaum contacted the FBI. It is difficult to understand what kind of company it was.

By the way, according to many experts, the Bloomberg article has so many inaccuracies and errors that it is even difficult to count them. Nevertheless, there are those who believe that all this is true, and the hardware attack is pre-planned.

Opponents of the "conspiracy theory" argue that the problem element gives an unusual traffic, which can be studied, if there was a module, then its unusual security system activity would have been detected at the very beginning, immediately after installation. According to Bloomberg, the module is a miniature device that can be anywhere. Most often it is placed in the slot for Ethernet, and it is through this channel that the spy chip transfers data.

Amazon, Apple and other companies conducted a survey of their own servers - in order to calm panicked. Andy Yassi stated that the modules of any kind were not detected, all of these are ordinary, unsupported rumors.

“Our employees always examine the equipment and monitor its operation - studying both hardware and software, regularly conducting security audits. In the future, we will strengthen this practice, as well as use the equipment we have designed, including such critical elements as processors, servers, storage systems and network equipment, ”Amazon said in a statement.