Long ago, when men and animals were all the same and spoke the same language, the ancient sages conceived a piece of wisdom:
“If though cannot withstand the heat, though must refrain from being present in the kitchen”
– Ancient Sage Proverb,
Fast forward thousands of years and we find tech companies like Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) considering that perhaps, they must promptly exit the kitchen. Both companies inability to handle spice are the direct result of recent news that the Chinese government may have been surveilling them thanks to a small microchip inserted into their products somewhere on the assembly line.
Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thursday that Chinese hackers have reportedly implanted microchips, “as small as the tip of a sharpened pencil” and designed to be virtually undetectable, into the data centers of over thirty companies, including “servers used by numerous data centers of such US corporate giants as Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN), as well as banks, hedge funds and government contractors.
According to reports, the chips were developed by a computer hardware attack unit in the People’s Liberation Army, and gave hackers complete control of all server activity once the chip was planted, allowing them to steal data, contact other servers, and manipulate business operations. In addition to the recent report of this possible breach, Bloomberg says that they’ve “been on the subject of a top secret US government investigation,” related to these microchips, starting in 2015.
Information from this alleged investigation suggests that these Chinese chips, for which I can now ascertain are not edible in the slightest, were sold by Super Micro Computer, an information tech company, based in San Jose, California. They are described, by industry heavyweights, as the “Microsoft of the hardware world.”
As reported by the US intelligence services involved in the 2015 investigation, 17 “unnamed intelligence and company sources say that Chinese spies placed computer chips inside equipment used by the aforementioned companies, as well as multiple US government agencies,” which could potentially give China access to internal networks. The report also claims that Amazon was are of this attack when one of its subsidiaries, Amazon Web Services (AWS), purchased, streaming video compression firm, Elemental Technologies, in 2015.
Apple (AAPL), AWS, and Super Micro have gone on record, fully disputing the report released by BusinessWeek. When CNBC reporters asked representatives from Apple (AAPL) to comment, they stated:
“We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple (AAPL).”
AWS had also denied any allegations suggested in the report, disclosing in a statement,
“As we shared with Bloomberg BusinessWeek multiple times over the last couple months, at no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified hardware or malicious chips in SuperMicro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon system.”
Domestic concerns with cybersecurity are not completely off base. In the last year, there has been an ongoing investigation of social media giants like Facebook (FB) whose data, consisting of accounts of millions of people around the world, was breached by Russian entities. In early May 2018, Cambridge Analytica, a data company working on the presidential campaign for Donald Trump, had been caught storing and manipulating the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users, without their consent, and using it for political insight.
In recent news, Facebook (FB) executive Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey have been working with the Senate Intelligence Committee to make sure their companies are properly regulating the use of their users’ data on their platforms. During a committee hearing, Dorsey spoke on Twitter’s (TWTR) recent push to label automated accounts, or “bots,” while Sandberg said that Facebook (FB) deleted hundreds of accounts and pages “engaged in the coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
As social media monsters like Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) plan to combat fake accounts and data security, we users need to be cognizant of what information we are divulging to these online platforms. Companies need to be exceedingly more transparent about how our data is used because if they fail to do so, the heat will rise, and as the sages have said for years, the kitchen might not be the best place to be when this happens.
