The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

China is more frequently and openly flexing its muscle.
I am imagining this aggresive posture from China will bite them in the bum in the not too distant future.
The West will gang up on this Eastern nation.
Then China will possibly respond by turning inward, thinking it can escape reality by trading within itself.
Would not be surprised if this One Belt Road initiative collapses and China once again becomes a hermit country.
The reason the West flourishes is because of freedom, the communist countries just don't get it.
Neither do the repressive religous countries.
 
Does anyone have a link to an article where it is actually described what the "secret chips" on those server boards were? How they worked? And how these chips could be on the boards without anybody noticing them?
Besides all the hype would I be more interested to read the technical details.
 
They are the size of a pencil tip, so not noticeable at all with the human eye. They allow access to the servers/cloud within 30 plus major tech companies, where these motherboards reside. One or two of the Chinese subcontractors (manufacturer) working on these boards were compromised/coerced by the Chinese military to add the chips. Allegedly. ;o). Reported and denied several years ago and Bloomberg may have run the story without proper vetting. again allegedly.
 
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Chip Fallout

Yesterday's bombshell Bloomberg report, about the Chinese military sneaking spy chips onto server components used across the U.S., had a big impact on Asian tech shares. Lenovo was down 23% at one point, despite the fact that the server maker at the heart of the scandal, Supermicro, is not a supplier. ZTE was down 11.6% and Win Semiconductors was down almost 10%. CGS-CIMB Securities analyst Ray Kwok: "Electronics produced in China may be viewed unsafe due to this news, and tech shares are falling in general because of that." Bloomberg P.S.: Read this techie analysis of the story and the denials from Amazon, Apple etc. by The Register.
 
ElCubano said:
They are the size of a pencil tip, so not noticeable at all with the human eye. They allow access to the servers/cloud within 30 plus major tech companies, where these motherboards reside. One or two of the Chinese subcontractors (manufacturer) working on these boards were compromised/coerced by the Chinese military to add the chips. Allegedly. ;o). Reported and denied several years ago and Bloomberg may have run the story without proper vetting. again allegedly.
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The degree to which they went to make an active component look like a surface mount passive component, shows the degree of stealthiness the nefariousness of their activity dictated. This isn't a basement hacker looking for gaming money.

I would also expect that this is only one of a number of spying mechanisms, hardware/software/etc, that the Chinese have deployed/will deploy. If I had economic quantities of data at risk, I sure would double down with multiple offline recovery backups as well as top of the line traffic analysis/firewall strategy.

A couple years back I dropped a basic Zyxel firewall box after some sniffer software showed I was getting pounded by garbage traffic. Not to mention several outbound connections that came up with all apps shut down. It now drops a S-ton of inbound traffic after blocking ranges from Africa/South America/China/Bulgaria/etc. For giggles, I picked 20 addresses randomly out of the list of folks trying to come into the ranch net and one was from a AF base in GA. WTF? ISP's need to offer a blocking service by Company, Country or even Continent. I'd pay a few bucks for that rather than have to screw with lots of address ranges.
 
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