13 ms·

One of Bloomberg’s sources told them Chinese spy chip story “didn’t make sense”

243 points by millisecond 8y ago

zymhan 8y ago
"But what really struck me is that like all the details that were even remotely technical, seemed like they had been lifted from from the conversations I had about theoretically how hardware implants work" Yeah that doesn't sound promising for Bloomberg.
weliketocode 8y ago
What's the outcome here if the expose turns out to be a farce? Written apology from Bloomberg? Fire the reporters? SEC charges of security fraud related to stock manipulation?
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  The first 2 are likely outcomes the third would be extremely unlikely unless there was very specific evidence that it was an intentional act. A lawsuit from damaged shareholders isn’t out of the question though.
- 0xcafecafe 8y ago
  The buck doesn't stop at the reporters right? They had somebody above them who gave the permission to run the story. Also, I want to believe that they did more groundwork to establish credibility before deciding to go for it. If it turns out to be false, I wouldn't know whom to trust anymore.
- e40 8y ago
  This will be exactly what POTUS needs to get his AG to move against the press. He's been threatening it since before he took office. Not saying it would succeed, but I'd wager he'll try.
  - draw_down 8y ago
    No, no.
  - heegemcgee 8y ago
    Oh my god, no. Edited: When i first read your comment, it sounded like you were emploring the president to act against the press. I see that i misread.
  - jerf 8y ago
    "This will be exactly what POTUS needs to get his AG to move against the press." If this was anything, it would be a reason to move against China. However, several days later, we can be fairly confident in saying it isn't any reason for the President to do anything, on the grounds that to the best of my knowledge, he hasn't done anything. (This opinion subject to change if someone cites something, of course. But I'd expect it would have come up in our HN conversations by now.) If this was a conspiracy from the government to make hay out of this news, they would have done so by now. Next day at the latest, given the speed of the news cycle nowadays. I think we can safely discard this theory now. (I also see no reason to even suspect that the President thinks he needs some sort of additional casus belli against China. He seems to believe he's got plenty already. If such things are being faked, they aren't being faked in stories like this, but at a much different level in much different places.)
- kjullien 8y ago
  Well if you look at the US company stocks since the story (not the chinese ones) you'll see none of them had a negative day. So either they miss-planed their "stock market" manipulation or it was not their intention...
  - dumbfounder 8y ago
    If it was their intent and they lost money, would be funny if they went to jail too.
  - AimForTheBushes 8y ago
    That's flat out false. AAPL was at an all time high when this story came out and then proceeded to drop 11 pts over the next 2 days. Not evening mentioning that SuperMicro's value has halved.
  - jwegan 8y ago
    Stock market manipulation doesn't mean you have to manipulate the entire $20 trillion dollar US stock market, it just means you tried to manipulate the price of a specific stock. Super Micro's stock dropped 40% based on the story. Hypothetically if someone shorted the stock and then pushed to get a story published that they knew had no basis in evidence, they would have profited handsomely and that would have been stock market manipulation.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  Genuine question: what happened to Leah Goodman and the editorial staff of Newsweek after the Satoshi Nakamoto debacle? As far as I can tell, nothing: https://www.newsweek.com/authors/leah-mcgrath-goodman https://www.newsweek.com/authors/leah-mcgrath-goodman
millisecond 8y ago
Sounds like Bloomberg was creating a bit of fiction about how something like this could happen and backing it into validation by sources. Particularly damning part, to me: "I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story." Clearly they didn't have an original hacked part like some have claimed/hoped.
- wang_li 8y ago
  It seemed incredible to me that they talked about these tiny little components being added to systems that allowed the evil doer to take complete control of the system. How exactly is something with 2 connections to the motherboard going to exert dramatic influence over a CPU with 1000+ connections to the rest of the system. Some 48-56 physical address lines, 64 data lines, and etc. all being manipulated by the magic rice grain? I don't think so.
  - justin66 8y ago
    There was a popular story a few days ago explaining how this could have worked. You're not trying to override "1000+ connections," you're trying to influence how the system boots. If you can force the system to load a bootloader from the network instead of from ROM, you can make it do all sorts of things.
  - moftz 8y ago
    All you need to do is reflash the BMC firmware. You can do that over a SPI bus, that only requires three lines (3 SPI lines + Vcc + Vss = 5 pins, just like the part...) You don't even have to rewrite the whole firmware, just patch the one section of code that does logins and then update the checksum if there is one. The firmware that is flashed in the factory is likely pulled from a read-only media and then checked against it. If you slip this implant in, you can just have the good firmware patched X hours after first turning on. Best case, you inject your patch into the BMC firmware before anyone can update to the latest that doesn't work with your patch. The adversary can then push an update to BMC again to something that can block new, good updates from killing the backdoor. Worst case, the user updates the firmware before the exploit is run. This patch corrupts the good, new firmware and the user has to reflash it. BMC keeps corrupting so RMA the old server and get a new one, maybe this one has an implant that will patch before the user can apply a good update.
gameswithgo 8y ago
What if the Chinese social engineered to get people to write this story. Meta. In seriousness though this is starting to smell like the whole story is plain wrong. Which is fascinating, however it came to be.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  The Chinese... or a third party?
  - ldiracdelta 8y ago
    Why couldn't it be the Russians again! Up to their dastardly tricks.
    - Pica_soO 8y ago
      And they would have got away with it too, if it where not for those meddling kids.
  - paleotrope 8y ago
    Who would want to hurt Amazon or Apple... especially in the cloud business.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  I, too, wondered if this might have been planted by someone to either disrupt existing supply chains or raise awareness of this sort of vulnerability, but this makes it look more like journalistic incompetence, possibly magnified by pressure to have impact.
- e40 8y ago
  What if the Chinese social engineered to get people to write this story. Meta. So next time, when it's real, we'll all ignore the story?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
mannykannot 8y ago
In a way, this resembles a technique that is sometimes (but should not be) used in the interrogation of criminal suspects: raise hypothetical questions, and then write up the replies as if they were statements/confessions of what actually happened.
perl4ever 8y ago
"putting two pieces of silicone in a single package" Is it the expert or the journalist who doesn't know the difference between silicon and silicone?
- makomk 8y ago
  Almost certainly the journalist, given that they're quoting something that he said during a podcast.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    It's not as though they're pronounced the same.
dangerface 8y ago
It seems like the writer has a personal stake in the idea that Apple can do no wrong, therefor Bloomberg must be lying. As an example they claim 10 reasons not to believe Bloomberg and cite two other pieces they have wrote, both proclaiming apples innocence. They literally give the same reason multiple times, and the reason is little more than "Apple wouldn't lie!". Apple has been caught lying in the past about other things like battery life. https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/05/chinese-spy-chip/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/05/chinese-spy-chip/
- krn 8y ago
  This. Also, Bloomberg's report is not specifically targeted at Apple. It seems, that it's being attacked here only because Apple is mentioned in it, and the author tends to trust Apple more than Bloomberg.
- cm2187 8y ago
  9to5mac is an apple fanboy website, but it doesn't mean their claims should be ignored.
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    Well... it does give us a possible motive for not telling the whole truth, or even lying. Not saying this is the case here, but this piece is far from objective.
    - rconti 8y ago
      Well then listen to the original source, the podcast, linked in the article?
- jjcc 8y ago
  They are not necessary lying. But Journalists (and also politicians, lawyers, etc.) have a tendency to wrap a suspicion into a conclusion. That's more deceptive than propaganda because the authors believe their conclusions. Here the trick is making the evidence unfalsifiable with solid reason. For example: the information source is classified due to national security.
bilbo0s 8y ago
Reporters can't be this dumb. >I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story... I don't know much about technology journalism, but I would think that no one who is a technology reporter would make a miss like that. And even if he/she did make a miss like that, wouldn't an editor or someone higher up call that out pretty much right away? I can't see why this story would have been put out as is without further investigation? Maybe some independent verification? I suppose there remains a slim possibility that the overarching theme of the story is true, and the reporters are simply spectacularly inept. There is also the possibility that the story is false and Bloomberg itself is spectacularly inept. Other possibilities are too terrible to contemplate. They run the gamut from simple propaganda, which is terrible, but would not be unexpected... all the way to out and out graft. ie - Some influential guy was short Apple.
- staplers 8y ago
  Being in the cryptocurrency space for half a decade and knowing the technical details regarding things like bitcoin will make it obvious that tech journalism is a glorified version of Forwarded emails your grandparents send you.
- echevil 8y ago
  > Reporters can't be this dumb. What makes you think so
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  > Reporters can't be this dumb. Have you ever actually dealt with reporters before? From my time in science I can attest that yes, reporters very much are this dumb at times. That's the issue with anyone who's too much of a generalist.
  - turingcompeteme 8y ago
    Bloomberg is also one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. Their entire business model revolves around providing accurate financial information. We happily pay $2k per month per person for it, partly because it is such a trusted source. Some reporters may be dumb, but if it has the Bloomberg name attached to it, and has far reaching effects in financial markets, you can be pretty confident that this wasn't just the work of some clueless reporter.
draw_down 8y ago
Is this story unraveling yet? Apple certainly isn’t letting it go and Bloomberg has been rather quiet since publication. But, it has been interesting to watch where the presumption of truth for this story lies for HN.
drivingmenuts 8y ago
This is an old story, but I can't help but think it is somehow relevant: https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/12/the-bloomberg-market-moving-bonus-179407 https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/12/the-bloomberg-m... In light of the above, something smells.
- SZJX 8y ago
  This is interesting. No idea why you were downvoted.
jessriedel 8y ago
I found the attempted humorous article "Here are the subjects our [science] reporters enjoy covering the least" to be very revealing of typical reporter attitudes > How could [discovering exoplanet] not be dramatic? If you're an actual f$@!%%# astronomer, that's how. Because then you'd feel compelled to drone on for page after page of details on the different telescopes you used, and the software pipelines the data went through, and how everything was normalized to... Exoplanets, which are BRAND NEW WORLDS UNKNOWN TO US get announced with excessive details on Monte Carlo sampling and Markov chains. I would not have thought it possible to suck the life out of stories like these, but the people who have chosen to make this their life's work manage. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/here-are-the-subjects-our-reporters-enjoy-covering-the-least/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/here-are-the-subject... In other words: "Why do these eggheads spend so much time worrying about whether the things they think they know are actually true when they could be talking about how it makes them feel?"
- mediocrejoker 8y ago
  Did you mean to reply to the 9to5mac article about the Bloomberg hardware expert Joe Fitzpatrick concerns about the Supermicro story? If so I do not understand your comment
  - ggggtez 8y ago
    "They’re not outright wrong, but they are theoretical" The source is upset that his technical jargon and long-winded explanation didn't make the final article. That's the connection to the above post. If you are a non-technical reader, and you had to read the raw transcript of a hardware guy telling you about firmware updates, you'd fall asleep. The point here is that the journalist cut out that stuff, which maybe makes the story less accurate, but the point of the story is still preserved.
    - detaro 8y ago
      That doesn't seem like a good summary. The bigger criticism is IMHO this: > When the piece was published, he was expecting to read about how this specific hack was achieved. Instead, he said, Bloomberg appeared to be parroting the precise theory he had outlined.
jackconnor 8y ago
Sounds like Bloomberg painted the theory they wanted to paint, and were not particularly subtle about covering there tracks. Assuming what this dude says is true, this is going to be very bad and very, very expensive for them.
m0skit0 8y ago
Despite the comments here, there's more evidence that that story was not made up, with real names this time at least. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evidence-of-hacked-supermicro-hardware-found-in-u-s-telecom https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evide... I'm not saying it is true, but of course all parties involved will deny everything, imagine how much it would hurt them if they acknowledged they have been hacked.
- jakebasile 8y ago
  I don't know, previous revelations of wide scale breaches haven't affected the target companies that much.
  - AimForTheBushes 8y ago
    They almost all cause an immediate loss in value though. Knowing that knowledge beforehand would net someone a lot of money.
    - airstrike 8y ago
      Especially around earnings season...
  - m0skit0 8y ago
    But those were one-time breaches related to patchable software flaws, and nobody knew for sure if a national-backed entity did it (maybe except Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet). They were not hardware and not directly linked to the Chinese government.
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  This evidence does nothing to support the original chip story. An ethernet implant is completely separate and does not affect the originally reported companies.
- seppin 8y ago
  All parties have every reason to deny. The companies will be hurt, the intel folks don't want anything public, ever. Journalists are the only ones that care about what the public knows.
nicolas_t 8y ago
I just wish that Super Micro shares were not otc and it would instead be listed on nasdaq...
- PhantomGremlin 8y ago
  You can blame Supermicro for that. A pesky problem of missing paperwork. Apparently Supermicro thinks that filing quarterly and annual reports is something optional, a "nice to have" rather than a "requirement". So they haven't bothered. Nasdaq feels otherwise, and got tired of waiting for them to get their house in order, and so delisted Supermicro. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/super-micros-stock-set-to-be-delisted-as-filing-deadline-wont-be-met-2018-08-22 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/super-micros-stock-set-to-...
raintrees 8y ago
I have been purposely misquoted several times in several California small town news agencies (their agenda almost diametrically opposed to my information), I am not particularly surprised this may be happening with Bloomberg. I have stopped responding to requests for interviews, as I am rarely informed ahead of time what the person's (or editor's) agenda may be, to decide if it aligns with what I wish to contribute ammunition/fodder towards.
TimTheTinker 8y ago
Here's the source 9to5mac is quoting from. It's a podcast episode, so no text: "Risky Business Feature: Named source in "The Big Hack" has doubts about the story": https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/ https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/
norseman 8y ago
What if Bloomberg knew that it was the NSA, but also knew that reporting it was the NSA could get them into trouble, so the deliberately reported it was the Chinese as disinformation and legal cover to publish the story?
vpribish 8y ago
Ironic that an article about how bloomberg may have misunderstood and jumbled their expert sources' info has some glaring mis-transcribed quotes! "For example putting two pieces of silicone in a single package makes sense when one of them is flash storage and the other is a micro controller. But an experienced observer could easily jump to the conclusion that it’s a hardware implant." yeah - silicone. but more importantly: he certainly meant IN-experienced.
mzs 8y ago
Technical people like to talk about technical things and non-technical reporters are torn-up about it. Then some outlets have reasons to report one side not in totally good faith. Here is a prior case: >For a journalist, the fear of getting it wrong is a mortal one. Experts loudly calling me wrongheaded were hard to shake. Many of their objections were highly technical—and I would never pass myself off as someone with an expert’s grasp of computer science. (Less than 24 hours after my piece went live, The Intercept published a very long, very detailed piece that suggested my piece was likely bunk.)… https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/trump-organizations-mystery-server/572485/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/trump-o...
- makomk 8y ago
  That guy should've been more scared about getting it wrong. Every single piece of evidence pointed to his supposed secret communications channel with a Russian bank (and a random American health clinic for some reason) being the simple result of run-of-the-mill mass marketing emails for Trump hotels sent by a company that had been subcontracted to do so for years. The Intercept even managed to obtain copies of some of the emails they'd sent. A DNS covert channel of the sort being suggested would require the secret co-operation of the technical staff at a company the Trump Organization didn't even have a direct contractual relationship with - why take that risk to set up a really terrible communications channel? Multiple outlets had apparently already passed on the story because it didn't hold up - but that didn't matter, because the moment he published it went viral on social media, with the Clinton camp's tweets alone getting tens of thousands of retweets. It would be no exaggeration to say that his decision to ignore the pesky technical objections he didn't understand and run the story anyway did permanent damage to the US political and news climate, that it made everyone's beliefs about the world a little more wrong forevermore. When Clinton's campaign tweeted to demand the FBI investigate, only one outlet - the New York Times - dared stand up and report that the FBI had already investigated and concluded all the evidence was consistent with it being exactly the boring junk email server it looked like, and people are still pointing to that article to drag the Times' reputation through the mud to this day. (Their own public editor even criticized them for questioning and not believing!) He created a world where not believing junk emails were secret Russian communications was, to quote the recent New Yorker article, the equivalent of believing "that space aliens did this".
rossdavidh 8y ago
This is the first criticism of Bloomberg's story that made a decent point (along with several bad ones). I definitely believe Apple or Amazon would lie, I definitely believe they might get told to by the feds, I definitely believe the Chinese government has at least looked into the idea of using their hold on the supply chain to get intelligence. The idea that there are much easier ways to do this, however, is an important one.
- techntoke 8y ago
  I believe Bloomberg and companies that compete with Supermicro have just as much reason, and possibly more to lie. To continue to manipulate the markets against white box vendors.
deleted 8y ago
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IronWolve 8y ago
Apple dumped supermicro in 2017 for security issues. But Bloomberg really needs to provide some information to back up their claims, this isn't a minor issue, this is a clam of spying from China. >Super Micro Computer Inc. SMCI, -18.58% dropped 8% in late trading Thursday after a report said Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.93% ended its relationship with the company after finding "a potential security vulnerability" in a data center server provided by Super Micro. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/super-micro-plummets-after-report-apple-cut-ties-on-security-fears-2017-02-23 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/super-micro-plummets-after...
- jlarocco 8y ago
  Can somebody explain how their stock is dropping? I tried to buy some over the weekend, because I think this will all blow over like Equifax, but I got a message saying they've been suspended from trading since August for not reporting to the SEC on time. Is it the OTC price?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
tomswartz07 8y ago
>I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story. I did a super quick search, and sure enough, yep- the images in the article are most likely a $0.38/each 0603 coupler. https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/TDK/HHM2510B1?qs=sGAEpiMZZMtMMXztyU6kdOGe15j15p2UXJNV928fndCH04b2xQBCoQ%3d%3d https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/TDK/HHM2510B1?qs=sGAEpi... I'd imagine it's mostly for illustrative purposes, but Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect in full force here.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect I'd argue that all this backlash is justification for why we don't typically have to worry about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. When something is egregiously wrong in the news, people talk about it, and we learn. As long as you're reading about something that will critical and knowledgeable people also reading it, then you should feel comfortable knowing that no backlash means it's probably fine.
rconti 8y ago
I'd have to go back and read the Apple and GCHQ (and .. was it .. Google?) denials more closely, but... I found it really interesting how pointed and specific the denials were, rather than blanket denials or refusals to say anything. I wonder if the technical details that were wrong in the article ended up giving cover to the denials. Maybe the hack never was in hardware, and Bloomberg totally screwed that part up, due to a misunderstanding of what it means to "manufacture a board with vulnerabilities" and that ended up giving inadvertent cover to those parties wishing to deny that a hardware hack was found in products in their datacenters? EDIT: Okay, maybe my theory's not so great. >On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the 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.
mmaunder 8y ago
This is just re reporting Pat Gray's podcast. https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/ https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/ Also worth mentioning here is the background on the credibility of these journo's that Robert Lee provides: https://twitter.com/RobertMLee/status/1049617855396933632?s=19 https://twitter.com/RobertMLee/status/1049617855396933632?s=... The most interesting tweet in that thread: "They claimed anonymous US intelligence community sources as well. Except I led the ICS threat discovery mission at the time at the NSA. And I had never heard of this attack being a cyber attack. The NSA doesn’t see everything but if the US IC is your source we would have." He is referring to the BTC pipeline piece that these guys wrote. It claims the pipeline explosion was a cyber attack, which has never been substantiated.
- monocasa 8y ago
  Why would the the NSA ICS threat discovery lead at the time be able to confirm one way or another? It seems like either way would be a "no comment" sort of situation.
  - mmaunder 8y ago
    He is a SANS instructor, CEO of Dragos Inc and very well respected in the infosec community. Helpful input like this, and being an educator, is why he has that reputation.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      But like, "let me confirm off hand on twitter what classified things we did or didn't do at the NSA", is exactly what you can't say. Why is he being allowed to confirm/deny specific actions of the NSA?
deleted 8y ago
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pharrington 8y ago
Since the lead in this story is maximally buried - "You put hardware in a device to help you persist the software, the malware. You don’t put hardware in a device to do the whole attack, you put hardware in the device to unlock the keys, to elevate the privileges on the shell, to open the network port and then you take a software or remote approach to do the rest of the work. And I think that’s the context of that quote."
VectorLock 8y ago
Can somebody hunt down one of those motherboards maybe on eBay or in their own data centers and track down this malicious device? Putting together a test circuit that throws the BMC firmware down it and see if anything different comes out the other end should be a simple enough task.
- bonestamp2 8y ago
  I like the idea. But, since hardware attacks like the one proposed are usually fairly labor intensive and they really want them to remain undetected, chances are good that the altered boards were only shipped to specific high value targets. If it's true that Amazon and Apple discovered flawed ones, all of those would have been returned to Supermicro and likely destroyed for the most part. If Supermicro was aware of the problem and ethical, they likely would have contacted other customers who they suspect could have received altered boards and replaced those boards too. I'm not saying it would be impossible to get your hands on one, but if there's any truth to this hack, I think you'd have to buy a ton of boards before you ever came across an altered one.
  - VectorLock 8y ago
    It doesn't seem like it would be all that labor intensive. Just change a part on the line, from what it described. I think if they were specifically targeting Apple & Amazon there would have to be someone complicit in Supermicro making sure that motherboards with the special part went to the right destinations. That seems more labor intensive than actually swapping the modified part.
    - bonestamp2 8y ago
      > I think if they were specifically targeting Apple & Amazon there would have to be someone complicit in Supermicro making sure that motherboards with the special part went to the right destinations. Fair enough, I guess it depends on their distribution model. When I order a macbook from apple.com, it ships from China. So, somebody there knows it's coming to me. Not that I'm a target, but I'd be surprised if they were shipping a container of servers to Supermicro and then to a customer. If Apple dropships one laptop, I assume Supermicro dropships containers. > That seems more labor intensive than actually swapping the modified part. Good point, assuming it was not labor intensive to modified part itself, then swapping them out on the line would be trivial.

243 points by millisecond 8y ago

"But what really struck me is that like all the details that were even remotely technical, seemed like they had been lifted from from the conversations I had about theoretically how hardware implants work" Yeah that doesn't sound promising for Bloomberg.

weliketocode 8y ago

What's the outcome here if the expose turns out to be a farce? Written apology from Bloomberg? Fire the reporters? SEC charges of security fraud related to stock manipulation?

kasey_junk 8y ago
The first 2 are likely outcomes the third would be extremely unlikely unless there was very specific evidence that it was an intentional act. A lawsuit from damaged shareholders isn’t out of the question though.
0xcafecafe 8y ago
The buck doesn't stop at the reporters right? They had somebody above them who gave the permission to run the story. Also, I want to believe that they did more groundwork to establish credibility before deciding to go for it. If it turns out to be false, I wouldn't know whom to trust anymore.
e40 8y ago
This will be exactly what POTUS needs to get his AG to move against the press. He's been threatening it since before he took office. Not saying it would succeed, but I'd wager he'll try.
- draw_down 8y ago
  No, no.
- heegemcgee 8y ago
  Oh my god, no. Edited: When i first read your comment, it sounded like you were emploring the president to act against the press. I see that i misread.
- jerf 8y ago
  "This will be exactly what POTUS needs to get his AG to move against the press." If this was anything, it would be a reason to move against China. However, several days later, we can be fairly confident in saying it isn't any reason for the President to do anything, on the grounds that to the best of my knowledge, he hasn't done anything. (This opinion subject to change if someone cites something, of course. But I'd expect it would have come up in our HN conversations by now.) If this was a conspiracy from the government to make hay out of this news, they would have done so by now. Next day at the latest, given the speed of the news cycle nowadays. I think we can safely discard this theory now. (I also see no reason to even suspect that the President thinks he needs some sort of additional casus belli against China. He seems to believe he's got plenty already. If such things are being faked, they aren't being faked in stories like this, but at a much different level in much different places.)
kjullien 8y ago
Well if you look at the US company stocks since the story (not the chinese ones) you'll see none of them had a negative day. So either they miss-planed their "stock market" manipulation or it was not their intention...
- dumbfounder 8y ago
  If it was their intent and they lost money, would be funny if they went to jail too.
- AimForTheBushes 8y ago
  That's flat out false. AAPL was at an all time high when this story came out and then proceeded to drop 11 pts over the next 2 days. Not evening mentioning that SuperMicro's value has halved.
- jwegan 8y ago
  Stock market manipulation doesn't mean you have to manipulate the entire $20 trillion dollar US stock market, it just means you tried to manipulate the price of a specific stock. Super Micro's stock dropped 40% based on the story. Hypothetically if someone shorted the stock and then pushed to get a story published that they knew had no basis in evidence, they would have profited handsomely and that would have been stock market manipulation.
mikekchar 8y ago
Genuine question: what happened to Leah Goodman and the editorial staff of Newsweek after the Satoshi Nakamoto debacle? As far as I can tell, nothing: https://www.newsweek.com/authors/leah-mcgrath-goodman https://www.newsweek.com/authors/leah-mcgrath-goodman

millisecond 8y ago

Sounds like Bloomberg was creating a bit of fiction about how something like this could happen and backing it into validation by sources. Particularly damning part, to me: "I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story." Clearly they didn't have an original hacked part like some have claimed/hoped.

wang_li 8y ago
It seemed incredible to me that they talked about these tiny little components being added to systems that allowed the evil doer to take complete control of the system. How exactly is something with 2 connections to the motherboard going to exert dramatic influence over a CPU with 1000+ connections to the rest of the system. Some 48-56 physical address lines, 64 data lines, and etc. all being manipulated by the magic rice grain? I don't think so.
- justin66 8y ago
  There was a popular story a few days ago explaining how this could have worked. You're not trying to override "1000+ connections," you're trying to influence how the system boots. If you can force the system to load a bootloader from the network instead of from ROM, you can make it do all sorts of things.
- moftz 8y ago
  All you need to do is reflash the BMC firmware. You can do that over a SPI bus, that only requires three lines (3 SPI lines + Vcc + Vss = 5 pins, just like the part...) You don't even have to rewrite the whole firmware, just patch the one section of code that does logins and then update the checksum if there is one. The firmware that is flashed in the factory is likely pulled from a read-only media and then checked against it. If you slip this implant in, you can just have the good firmware patched X hours after first turning on. Best case, you inject your patch into the BMC firmware before anyone can update to the latest that doesn't work with your patch. The adversary can then push an update to BMC again to something that can block new, good updates from killing the backdoor. Worst case, the user updates the firmware before the exploit is run. This patch corrupts the good, new firmware and the user has to reflash it. BMC keeps corrupting so RMA the old server and get a new one, maybe this one has an implant that will patch before the user can apply a good update.

gameswithgo 8y ago

What if the Chinese social engineered to get people to write this story. Meta. In seriousness though this is starting to smell like the whole story is plain wrong. Which is fascinating, however it came to be.

Sharlin 8y ago
The Chinese... or a third party?
- ldiracdelta 8y ago
  Why couldn't it be the Russians again! Up to their dastardly tricks.
  - Pica_soO 8y ago
    And they would have got away with it too, if it where not for those meddling kids.
- paleotrope 8y ago
  Who would want to hurt Amazon or Apple... especially in the cloud business.
mannykannot 8y ago
I, too, wondered if this might have been planted by someone to either disrupt existing supply chains or raise awareness of this sort of vulnerability, but this makes it look more like journalistic incompetence, possibly magnified by pressure to have impact.
e40 8y ago
What if the Chinese social engineered to get people to write this story. Meta. So next time, when it's real, we'll all ignore the story?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

mannykannot 8y ago

In a way, this resembles a technique that is sometimes (but should not be) used in the interrogation of criminal suspects: raise hypothetical questions, and then write up the replies as if they were statements/confessions of what actually happened.

perl4ever 8y ago

"putting two pieces of silicone in a single package" Is it the expert or the journalist who doesn't know the difference between silicon and silicone?

makomk 8y ago
Almost certainly the journalist, given that they're quoting something that he said during a podcast.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  It's not as though they're pronounced the same.

dangerface 8y ago

It seems like the writer has a personal stake in the idea that Apple can do no wrong, therefor Bloomberg must be lying. As an example they claim 10 reasons not to believe Bloomberg and cite two other pieces they have wrote, both proclaiming apples innocence. They literally give the same reason multiple times, and the reason is little more than "Apple wouldn't lie!". Apple has been caught lying in the past about other things like battery life. https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/05/chinese-spy-chip/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/05/chinese-spy-chip/

krn 8y ago
This. Also, Bloomberg's report is not specifically targeted at Apple. It seems, that it's being attacked here only because Apple is mentioned in it, and the author tends to trust Apple more than Bloomberg.
cm2187 8y ago
9to5mac is an apple fanboy website, but it doesn't mean their claims should be ignored.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  Well... it does give us a possible motive for not telling the whole truth, or even lying. Not saying this is the case here, but this piece is far from objective.
  - rconti 8y ago
    Well then listen to the original source, the podcast, linked in the article?
jjcc 8y ago
They are not necessary lying. But Journalists (and also politicians, lawyers, etc.) have a tendency to wrap a suspicion into a conclusion. That's more deceptive than propaganda because the authors believe their conclusions. Here the trick is making the evidence unfalsifiable with solid reason. For example: the information source is classified due to national security.

bilbo0s 8y ago

Reporters can't be this dumb. >I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story... I don't know much about technology journalism, but I would think that no one who is a technology reporter would make a miss like that. And even if he/she did make a miss like that, wouldn't an editor or someone higher up call that out pretty much right away? I can't see why this story would have been put out as is without further investigation? Maybe some independent verification? I suppose there remains a slim possibility that the overarching theme of the story is true, and the reporters are simply spectacularly inept. There is also the possibility that the story is false and Bloomberg itself is spectacularly inept. Other possibilities are too terrible to contemplate. They run the gamut from simple propaganda, which is terrible, but would not be unexpected... all the way to out and out graft. ie - Some influential guy was short Apple.

staplers 8y ago
Being in the cryptocurrency space for half a decade and knowing the technical details regarding things like bitcoin will make it obvious that tech journalism is a glorified version of Forwarded emails your grandparents send you.
echevil 8y ago
> Reporters can't be this dumb. What makes you think so
neuromantik8086 8y ago
> Reporters can't be this dumb. Have you ever actually dealt with reporters before? From my time in science I can attest that yes, reporters very much are this dumb at times. That's the issue with anyone who's too much of a generalist.
- turingcompeteme 8y ago
  Bloomberg is also one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. Their entire business model revolves around providing accurate financial information. We happily pay $2k per month per person for it, partly because it is such a trusted source. Some reporters may be dumb, but if it has the Bloomberg name attached to it, and has far reaching effects in financial markets, you can be pretty confident that this wasn't just the work of some clueless reporter.

draw_down 8y ago

Is this story unraveling yet? Apple certainly isn’t letting it go and Bloomberg has been rather quiet since publication. But, it has been interesting to watch where the presumption of truth for this story lies for HN.

drivingmenuts 8y ago

This is an old story, but I can't help but think it is somehow relevant: https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/12/the-bloomberg-market-moving-bonus-179407 https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/12/the-bloomberg-m... In light of the above, something smells.

SZJX 8y ago
This is interesting. No idea why you were downvoted.

jessriedel 8y ago

I found the attempted humorous article "Here are the subjects our [science] reporters enjoy covering the least" to be very revealing of typical reporter attitudes > How could [discovering exoplanet] not be dramatic? If you're an actual f$@!%%# astronomer, that's how. Because then you'd feel compelled to drone on for page after page of details on the different telescopes you used, and the software pipelines the data went through, and how everything was normalized to... Exoplanets, which are BRAND NEW WORLDS UNKNOWN TO US get announced with excessive details on Monte Carlo sampling and Markov chains. I would not have thought it possible to suck the life out of stories like these, but the people who have chosen to make this their life's work manage. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/here-are-the-subjects-our-reporters-enjoy-covering-the-least/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/here-are-the-subject... In other words: "Why do these eggheads spend so much time worrying about whether the things they think they know are actually true when they could be talking about how it makes them feel?"

mediocrejoker 8y ago
Did you mean to reply to the 9to5mac article about the Bloomberg hardware expert Joe Fitzpatrick concerns about the Supermicro story? If so I do not understand your comment
- ggggtez 8y ago
  "They’re not outright wrong, but they are theoretical" The source is upset that his technical jargon and long-winded explanation didn't make the final article. That's the connection to the above post. If you are a non-technical reader, and you had to read the raw transcript of a hardware guy telling you about firmware updates, you'd fall asleep. The point here is that the journalist cut out that stuff, which maybe makes the story less accurate, but the point of the story is still preserved.
  - detaro 8y ago
    That doesn't seem like a good summary. The bigger criticism is IMHO this: > When the piece was published, he was expecting to read about how this specific hack was achieved. Instead, he said, Bloomberg appeared to be parroting the precise theory he had outlined.

jackconnor 8y ago

Sounds like Bloomberg painted the theory they wanted to paint, and were not particularly subtle about covering there tracks. Assuming what this dude says is true, this is going to be very bad and very, very expensive for them.

m0skit0 8y ago

Despite the comments here, there's more evidence that that story was not made up, with real names this time at least. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evidence-of-hacked-supermicro-hardware-found-in-u-s-telecom https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evide... I'm not saying it is true, but of course all parties involved will deny everything, imagine how much it would hurt them if they acknowledged they have been hacked.

jakebasile 8y ago
I don't know, previous revelations of wide scale breaches haven't affected the target companies that much.
- AimForTheBushes 8y ago
  They almost all cause an immediate loss in value though. Knowing that knowledge beforehand would net someone a lot of money.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    Especially around earnings season...
- m0skit0 8y ago
  But those were one-time breaches related to patchable software flaws, and nobody knew for sure if a national-backed entity did it (maybe except Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet). They were not hardware and not directly linked to the Chinese government.
TACIXAT 8y ago
This evidence does nothing to support the original chip story. An ethernet implant is completely separate and does not affect the originally reported companies.
seppin 8y ago
All parties have every reason to deny. The companies will be hurt, the intel folks don't want anything public, ever. Journalists are the only ones that care about what the public knows.

nicolas_t 8y ago

I just wish that Super Micro shares were not otc and it would instead be listed on nasdaq...

PhantomGremlin 8y ago
You can blame Supermicro for that. A pesky problem of missing paperwork. Apparently Supermicro thinks that filing quarterly and annual reports is something optional, a "nice to have" rather than a "requirement". So they haven't bothered. Nasdaq feels otherwise, and got tired of waiting for them to get their house in order, and so delisted Supermicro. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/super-micros-stock-set-to-be-delisted-as-filing-deadline-wont-be-met-2018-08-22 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/super-micros-stock-set-to-...

raintrees 8y ago

I have been purposely misquoted several times in several California small town news agencies (their agenda almost diametrically opposed to my information), I am not particularly surprised this may be happening with Bloomberg. I have stopped responding to requests for interviews, as I am rarely informed ahead of time what the person's (or editor's) agenda may be, to decide if it aligns with what I wish to contribute ammunition/fodder towards.

TimTheTinker 8y ago

Here's the source 9to5mac is quoting from. It's a podcast episode, so no text: "Risky Business Feature: Named source in "The Big Hack" has doubts about the story": https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/ https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/

norseman 8y ago

What if Bloomberg knew that it was the NSA, but also knew that reporting it was the NSA could get them into trouble, so the deliberately reported it was the Chinese as disinformation and legal cover to publish the story?

vpribish 8y ago

Ironic that an article about how bloomberg may have misunderstood and jumbled their expert sources' info has some glaring mis-transcribed quotes! "For example putting two pieces of silicone in a single package makes sense when one of them is flash storage and the other is a micro controller. But an experienced observer could easily jump to the conclusion that it’s a hardware implant." yeah - silicone. but more importantly: he certainly meant IN-experienced.

mzs 8y ago

Technical people like to talk about technical things and non-technical reporters are torn-up about it. Then some outlets have reasons to report one side not in totally good faith. Here is a prior case: >For a journalist, the fear of getting it wrong is a mortal one. Experts loudly calling me wrongheaded were hard to shake. Many of their objections were highly technical—and I would never pass myself off as someone with an expert’s grasp of computer science. (Less than 24 hours after my piece went live, The Intercept published a very long, very detailed piece that suggested my piece was likely bunk.)… https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/trump-organizations-mystery-server/572485/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/trump-o...

makomk 8y ago
That guy should've been more scared about getting it wrong. Every single piece of evidence pointed to his supposed secret communications channel with a Russian bank (and a random American health clinic for some reason) being the simple result of run-of-the-mill mass marketing emails for Trump hotels sent by a company that had been subcontracted to do so for years. The Intercept even managed to obtain copies of some of the emails they'd sent. A DNS covert channel of the sort being suggested would require the secret co-operation of the technical staff at a company the Trump Organization didn't even have a direct contractual relationship with - why take that risk to set up a really terrible communications channel? Multiple outlets had apparently already passed on the story because it didn't hold up - but that didn't matter, because the moment he published it went viral on social media, with the Clinton camp's tweets alone getting tens of thousands of retweets. It would be no exaggeration to say that his decision to ignore the pesky technical objections he didn't understand and run the story anyway did permanent damage to the US political and news climate, that it made everyone's beliefs about the world a little more wrong forevermore. When Clinton's campaign tweeted to demand the FBI investigate, only one outlet - the New York Times - dared stand up and report that the FBI had already investigated and concluded all the evidence was consistent with it being exactly the boring junk email server it looked like, and people are still pointing to that article to drag the Times' reputation through the mud to this day. (Their own public editor even criticized them for questioning and not believing!) He created a world where not believing junk emails were secret Russian communications was, to quote the recent New Yorker article, the equivalent of believing "that space aliens did this".

rossdavidh 8y ago

This is the first criticism of Bloomberg's story that made a decent point (along with several bad ones). I definitely believe Apple or Amazon would lie, I definitely believe they might get told to by the feds, I definitely believe the Chinese government has at least looked into the idea of using their hold on the supply chain to get intelligence. The idea that there are much easier ways to do this, however, is an important one.

techntoke 8y ago
I believe Bloomberg and companies that compete with Supermicro have just as much reason, and possibly more to lie. To continue to manipulate the markets against white box vendors.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

IronWolve 8y ago

Apple dumped supermicro in 2017 for security issues. But Bloomberg really needs to provide some information to back up their claims, this isn't a minor issue, this is a clam of spying from China. >Super Micro Computer Inc. SMCI, -18.58% dropped 8% in late trading Thursday after a report said Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.93% ended its relationship with the company after finding "a potential security vulnerability" in a data center server provided by Super Micro. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/super-micro-plummets-after-report-apple-cut-ties-on-security-fears-2017-02-23 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/super-micro-plummets-after...

jlarocco 8y ago
Can somebody explain how their stock is dropping? I tried to buy some over the weekend, because I think this will all blow over like Equifax, but I got a message saying they've been suspended from trading since August for not reporting to the SEC on time. Is it the OTC price?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

tomswartz07 8y ago

>I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story. I did a super quick search, and sure enough, yep- the images in the article are most likely a $0.38/each 0603 coupler. https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/TDK/HHM2510B1?qs=sGAEpiMZZMtMMXztyU6kdOGe15j15p2UXJNV928fndCH04b2xQBCoQ%3d%3d https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/TDK/HHM2510B1?qs=sGAEpi... I'd imagine it's mostly for illustrative purposes, but Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect in full force here.

nerdponx 8y ago
Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect I'd argue that all this backlash is justification for why we don't typically have to worry about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. When something is egregiously wrong in the news, people talk about it, and we learn. As long as you're reading about something that will critical and knowledgeable people also reading it, then you should feel comfortable knowing that no backlash means it's probably fine.

rconti 8y ago

I'd have to go back and read the Apple and GCHQ (and .. was it .. Google?) denials more closely, but... I found it really interesting how pointed and specific the denials were, rather than blanket denials or refusals to say anything. I wonder if the technical details that were wrong in the article ended up giving cover to the denials. Maybe the hack never was in hardware, and Bloomberg totally screwed that part up, due to a misunderstanding of what it means to "manufacture a board with vulnerabilities" and that ended up giving inadvertent cover to those parties wishing to deny that a hardware hack was found in products in their datacenters? EDIT: Okay, maybe my theory's not so great. >On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the 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.

mmaunder 8y ago

This is just re reporting Pat Gray's podcast. https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/ https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/ Also worth mentioning here is the background on the credibility of these journo's that Robert Lee provides: https://twitter.com/RobertMLee/status/1049617855396933632?s=19 https://twitter.com/RobertMLee/status/1049617855396933632?s=... The most interesting tweet in that thread: "They claimed anonymous US intelligence community sources as well. Except I led the ICS threat discovery mission at the time at the NSA. And I had never heard of this attack being a cyber attack. The NSA doesn’t see everything but if the US IC is your source we would have." He is referring to the BTC pipeline piece that these guys wrote. It claims the pipeline explosion was a cyber attack, which has never been substantiated.

monocasa 8y ago
Why would the the NSA ICS threat discovery lead at the time be able to confirm one way or another? It seems like either way would be a "no comment" sort of situation.
- mmaunder 8y ago
  He is a SANS instructor, CEO of Dragos Inc and very well respected in the infosec community. Helpful input like this, and being an educator, is why he has that reputation.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    But like, "let me confirm off hand on twitter what classified things we did or didn't do at the NSA", is exactly what you can't say. Why is he being allowed to confirm/deny specific actions of the NSA?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pharrington 8y ago

Since the lead in this story is maximally buried - "You put hardware in a device to help you persist the software, the malware. You don’t put hardware in a device to do the whole attack, you put hardware in the device to unlock the keys, to elevate the privileges on the shell, to open the network port and then you take a software or remote approach to do the rest of the work. And I think that’s the context of that quote."

VectorLock 8y ago

Can somebody hunt down one of those motherboards maybe on eBay or in their own data centers and track down this malicious device? Putting together a test circuit that throws the BMC firmware down it and see if anything different comes out the other end should be a simple enough task.

bonestamp2 8y ago
I like the idea. But, since hardware attacks like the one proposed are usually fairly labor intensive and they really want them to remain undetected, chances are good that the altered boards were only shipped to specific high value targets. If it's true that Amazon and Apple discovered flawed ones, all of those would have been returned to Supermicro and likely destroyed for the most part. If Supermicro was aware of the problem and ethical, they likely would have contacted other customers who they suspect could have received altered boards and replaced those boards too. I'm not saying it would be impossible to get your hands on one, but if there's any truth to this hack, I think you'd have to buy a ton of boards before you ever came across an altered one.
- VectorLock 8y ago
  It doesn't seem like it would be all that labor intensive. Just change a part on the line, from what it described. I think if they were specifically targeting Apple & Amazon there would have to be someone complicit in Supermicro making sure that motherboards with the special part went to the right destinations. That seems more labor intensive than actually swapping the modified part.
  - bonestamp2 8y ago
    > I think if they were specifically targeting Apple & Amazon there would have to be someone complicit in Supermicro making sure that motherboards with the special part went to the right destinations. Fair enough, I guess it depends on their distribution model. When I order a macbook from apple.com, it ships from China. So, somebody there knows it's coming to me. Not that I'm a target, but I'd be surprised if they were shipping a container of servers to Supermicro and then to a customer. If Apple dropships one laptop, I assume Supermicro dropships containers. > That seems more labor intensive than actually swapping the modified part. Good point, assuming it was not labor intensive to modified part itself, then swapping them out on the line would be trivial.