Apple, Amazon Deny Having China’s Spy Chips In Their Data Centers
Oct. 5, 2018Apple and Amazon have strongly denied a media report that claimed a massive “supply chain attack” by Chinese spies planted chips in motherboards in data servers bought by these two giants among 30 tech companies.
Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday reported that malicious chips, as small as a sharpened pencil tip, were planted by a unit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to gain access to the supply chain of SuperMicro, often called the “Microsoft of the hardware world”.
“Over the course of the past year, Bloomberg has contacted us multiple times with claims, sometimes vague and sometimes elaborate, of an alleged security incident at Apple. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them,”Apple said.
“Apple never had any contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement,”the tech giant added. According to Apple, its digital assistant Siri and social search and analytics company Topsy never shared servers.
According to Steve Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is Amazon’s Cloud arm,“there are so many inaccuracies inthis article as it relates to Amazon that they are hard to count”.
“Amazon employs stringent security standards across our supply chain – investigating all hardware and software prior to going into production and performing regular security audits internally and with our supply chain partners,”Schmidt said in a statement.“We further strengthen our security posture by implementing our own hardware designs for critical components such as processors, servers, storage systems, and networking equipment,”he added.
