[Beowulf] Hacked MBs It was only a matter of time

[Jeff Johnson]

The denials by Amazon, Apple and Supermicro aren't surprising as all risk
losing consumer confidence, Amazon and Apple most of all. Unlike everyone
here, much of the public are technology neophytes and could be scared away
from things like Amazon purchases, ApplePay/iTunes and other e-commerce
transactions. A month away from the holiday shopping season, the downside
potential of a news story like this is significant.

My $.02 I doubt this story could/would be generated out of thin air. It was
likely leaked. It will be days or weeks before any details or scope emerges
so until then denials and conjecture abound.



On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 10:19 AM Kilian Cavalotti <
kilian.cavalotti.work at gmail.com> wrote:

> For Ar's report on this:
>
> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/bloomberg-super-micro-motherboards-used-by-apple-amazon-contained-chinese-spy-chips/
> """
> Super Micro, Apple, and Amazon all deny every part of the Bloomberg
> story. Amazon says that it's untrue that "[Amazon Web Services] worked
> with the FBI to investigate or provide data about malicious hardware;"
> Apple writes that it is "not aware of any investigation by the FBI,"
> and Super Micro similarly is "not aware of any investigation regarding
> this topic." Apple suggests further that Bloomberg may be
> misunderstanding the 2016 incident [1] in which a Super Micro server
> with malware-infected firmware was found in Apple's design lab.
>
> Apple's denial in particular is unusually verbose, addressing several
> different parts of the Bloomberg report explicitly, and is a far cry
> from the kind of vague denial that one might expect if the company
> were subject to a government gag order preventing it from speaking
> freely about the alleged hack.
> """
> [1]
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple-axed-supermicro-servers-from-datacenters-because-of-bad-firmware-update/
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Kilian
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-- 
------------------------------
Jeff Johnson
Co-Founder
Aeon Computing

jeff.johnson at aeoncomputing.com
www.aeoncomputing.com
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High-Performance Computing / Lustre Filesystems / Scale-out Storage
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