Forgotten Chinese Spy Chip Story? We Haven't – It's Still Wrong, Super Micro tells SEC

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Jul 27, 2015
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The computer server maker at the center of a dramatic secret Chinese spy-chip story has again insisted the yarn is wrong, and called the whole thing "technically implausible."

US-headquartered Super Micro sent a note to its customers late last week denying all claims in a recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek article that the Chinese government had slipped tiny surveillance chips into selected Super Micro's server motherboards during their manufacture in the Middle Kingdom. These bugged boards were supposedly shipped to some 30 organizations – from a major bank and US government contractors to Apple and Amazon – and the chips were allegedly designed to open backdoors, allowing data to be extracted by Chinese state spies. Apple and Amazon, like Super Micro, state none of this ever happened. Crucially, Super Micro also forwarded a copy of its customer advisory to the America's financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has published it online.

In the letter to customers, Super Micro CEO Charles Liang, and two senior veeps, say they are confident Bloomberg's tale of surveillance chips inserted into its products was wrong. "From everything we know and have seen, no malicious hardware chip has been implanted during the manufacturing of our motherboards," they wrote. They also complain about the difficulty of dealing with a false negative: "We trust you appreciate the difficulty of proving that something did not happen, even though the reporters have produced no affected motherboard or any such malicious hardware chip. As we have said firmly, no one has shown us a motherboard containing any unauthorized hardware chip, we are not aware of any such unauthorized chip, and no government agency has alerted us to the existence of any unauthorized chip."
 

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