How China (may have) spied on big American companies

There's a splashy, fascinating long read on Bloomberg today that examines a disturbing allegation: Chinese operatives may have infiltrated the manufacturing supply chain to embed spy chip-sets on server motherboards. The story paints a frightening picture of an operation to target Amazon, Apple and other big enterprises from the top by targeting Supermicro, a server manufacturer.  It worked like this: people working on behalf of the government muscled their way into Supermicro factories and embedded tiny chips into server motherboards without any knowledge of the company itself or the customer.  These chips are supposedly the size of a grain of rice, and fully independent, able to modify the server's remote administration layer to silently collect data and ship it back to China when connected to the internet: The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use –How China hacked American companies ↗

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