8 ms·

The question I have is: is it possible that there was such an incredible threat to national security that even an auditor could be convinced by a federal agency

• latentpot 8y ago
  Plausible deniability? Perhaps the ramifications were so huge (maybe for Apple and others) they would have gone bankrupt in lawsuits. So maybe this is a easier way to bail them out. Just using a tinfoil hat here.
• nscalf 8y ago
  It's definitely easier for a reporter to be a little over eager with a story and run it before being fully vetted than it is to co-opt federal agencies and independent auditors. I'm not saying that it's not possible for the situation you described to have happened, just that it would be an extreme outlier.
  • Cyph0n 8y ago
    That's true, but why hasn't Bloomberg retracted the article yet? It's been two months since the piece was published. Given all this attention, don't you think that Bloomberg would have issued a retraction by now if it was simply the case of an overzealous reporter?
    • rincebrain 8y ago
      Given the nature of their doubling down upfront about it, it could be quite problematic for them to admit they were Very Wrong. It's also possibly permanently going to be unclear whether this is factually accurate unless someone discovers a compromised system or the sources for the reporters provide enough information on why they believe what they do to actually investigate.
      • Symmetry 8y ago
        If they were to publicly say they were wrong then suddenly that would be News the way the original reporting was. If they don't then only specialty publications will cover the failure to pan out.
      • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        Bloomberg rewards their "journalists" for moving markets and use the promise of market leading scoops as the carrot to win subscriptions. An admission of generating fake news hurts their core business deeply.
• dgzl 8y ago
  Could it be, whoever supplied the information to begin with was just trying to burn the news org? Or possibly the leaker made a horrible mistake regarding facts? Or possibly there is indeed a conspiracy to cover up a hardware backdoor? These are tough times my friend.
• ryanmercer 8y ago
  >is it possible that there was such an incredible threat to national security that even an auditor could be convinced by a federal agency to give a false report? Absolutely possible, even somewhat plausible but unlikely. Conspiracies are hard to maintain "2 can keep a secret if 1 of them is dead". You could outright threaten someone with any number of means to get them to comply with your wishes, this is how espionage often works at a state level "ho ho, you like underage boys Mr. Smith, we have these photos of you, you will help us spy on your government!" or "You owe us much monies from your gambling, you can give us information or we make your life very difficult", simply using sex to ease someone into complying (sexpionage both as blackmail and as reward/entrapment. A possible famous case of the blackmail route was with the NSA in 1960, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_and_Mitchell_defection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_and_Mitchell_defection ), finding actual irregularities in someone's finances and threatening to go after them for it etc. Again, possible and somewhat plausible but probably just a journalist fabricating a source or being misled by one. Yellow Journalism is a thing after all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism and if you look at papers in the 19th century you see all sorts of outright fabrications just to sell papers, like the Great Moon Hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax
  • moftz 8y ago
    A US intelligence agency nowadays would just issue a National Security Letter and force you to not say anything otherwise you go to jail. Most people really don't want to go to jail. An intelligence agency would really only resort to blackmail or extortion if they were operating in a foreign country where they couldn't outright bribe someone.
    • ryanmercer 8y ago
      I imagine that is defeated by simply saying "I refuse to lie", which could be career suicide but it's still an option. I can see how legally they could say "you can't reveal that information, it's a matter of national security" but I don't quite think we're at the point in America where they can go "Say this or go to prison".
• blakesterz 8y ago
  I keep asking the same thing "how could a reputable news agency get a report so wrong?" They said they have many sources, they double checked things. But the denials from the various places have been SO 100% unbelievably "NO NEVER HAPPENED" that it's hard to know what's going on. If it really never did happen, why did so many people lie about this to reporters? What was the end game? It seems impossible that the reporters just made it all up, doesn't it? But maybe someone paid them to make it all up! It's just crazy conspiracies all the way down.
• pmorici 8y ago
  I think the most likely explanation is that Bloomberg got played by the sources who perhaps wanted to trade on the price action the story would obviously cause. We don't really know anything about Bloomberg's sources we do know the nature of all the parties denying any of this is true.
  • cm2187 8y ago
    I find that highly unlikely. Since Supermicro was kicked out of the NASDAQ, I would expect their trading to be much thinner. It would be trivial for regulators to spot some inside trades. And if the sources are indeed intelligence officials, I'd expect their financials to be under special scrutiny.
    • newaccoutnas 8y ago
      It wasn't only Supermicro that took a hit but also any company using their products (AWS etc)
    • asdff 8y ago
      Everyone named in the article took a price hit that week. If you knew this article was coming you'd be well positioned for easy profit.
  • jakobegger 8y ago
    Nope. The only named source in the article said on Twitter that the journalist reported speculation about possible attacks as facts. The story was fabricated by the journalist. How it got through fact-checking, I don't know.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • asdff 8y ago
      That doesn't mean people didn't feed the journalist heavy handed speculation to make a profit from short positions.
• mtgx 8y ago
  What bothers me most about this article is that it's based around what "Super Micro says" -- why would I care about what Supermicro says? They are the ones being accused of having backdoors in their chips. I would've liked to hear this directly from the company doing the audit, without Super Micro's own "interpretation". The second thing that bothers me about this story is that it was Supermicro that paid for the audit. Maybe there was no one else going to do it, or maybe they just thought to get ahead of anyone else trying to review their chips. I don't know, but it doesn't sit well with me. Only recently we saw at least two major tech companies skirt FCC's privacy monitoring by paying themselves for the audits: Google and Facebook. Both had multiple major privacy scandals in the past couple of years, but somehow all of these privacy issues were completely missed by the companies auditing them.
  • notabot 8y ago
    "A person familiar with the analysis told Reuters it had been conducted by global firm Nardello & Co and that customers could ask for more detail on that company’s findings." So I guess yes you can bypass Super Micro if you're a customer.
    • mtgx 8y ago
      I saw that, but it's not nearly enough. Why isn't the report made public? Why do we have to take Super Micro's word for it? I seem to remember a very hostile and skeptical attitude from HN against Binance doing exactly this sort of thing when they announced the results of their paid-for "audit" of Tether financials. Why aren't we treating Super Micro's report of the audit the same way?
      • jessaustin 8y ago
        HN people know that moving off of AWS is going to be a pain.
• majia 8y ago
  It's rather easy for someone to mislead a BP reporter who understands little about the technical details but is very eager to publish something shocking. The reporter may have emailed a few dozen security researchers to verify the story, but those who don't believe in the story are less likely to reply (and the reporter is more likely to ignore them), leading to a sampling bias.
  • joshstrange 8y ago
    And/or the people who did reply gave a response of something along the lines of “Its technically possibly but...” and the author ignored everything after the but.
    • SCHiM 8y ago
      I see how this could have happened yes. Especially if the reporter was not clear on the angle of the questions. It's easy to see how security researchers could go off on a tangent about the insecurities of IMPI and other out of band management systems. Which'd sound like an endorsement to the reporter. Who knows what really happened.
    • hopler 8y ago
      What would go after the but? Third parties don't know whether a board was exploited.
      • joshstrange 8y ago
        "but unless I was able to inspect the board I wouldn't believe it's happening" "but that kind of attack has never been seen in the wild and is highly unlikely" "but large tech companies have teams that vet the hardware they use on a unit by unit basis and would notice something like that"
    • ghaff 8y ago
      TBH if you’re talking to a reporter, thats a bad way to answer a question. “It’s technically possible” is the sort of sound bite someone will grab while ignoring the 5 minute spiel on IPMI and bus interfaces etc. that follows. Be very careful about giving short quotable statements in plain English that you don’t want to see in print.
• sschueller 8y ago
  The media falls for bullshit all the time, Weapons of mass destruction, incubator babies in Kuwait, etc. They are in the business of making money and not getting the story right and since there is hardley any consequences for them why would they care? Bloomberg here will blame its source and take no responsibility.
  • wklauss 8y ago
    > They are in the business of making money and not getting the story right All business are "in the business of making money", that's what being a business is. What sets them apart is how they make it. In the case of media companies is, precisely, by getting the story right. A publisher that doesn't is more likely to lose influence and readership as time goes by. For a publication like Bloomberg, more so. So yeah, they do care. That doesn't mean they don't fall for scams or bad reporting. They do, but it's in their best interest not to do so. In this case, I'm sure Bloomberg is already frantically calling all the reporter sources. They should have done it before the piece was published, sure, and they'll sure blame the reporter and the sources, but I think it's disingenuous to think they just shrug these things off.
    • AsyncAwait 8y ago
      > What sets them apart is how they make it. In the case of media companies is, precisely, by getting the story right. Ideally yes, but nowdays it seems to be rather; by getting the story framed exactly as their corporate owner wants them to frame it. Yes, they'll slowly loose credibility and in fact that is happening, but the process takes decades and is not likely to affect current reporters, if they lied in service of the status quo.
    • usefulcat 8y ago
      > In the case of media companies is, precisely, by getting the story right. Strongly disagree. Media companies make money by publishing stories that people want to hear about.
    • gdy 8y ago
      "In the case of media companies is, precisely, by getting the story right." Almost any article about Russia is a counter example to this.
• entity345 8y ago
  An auditor would not have found anything because the alleged attack occurred several years ago and would most likely have been targeted at a limited number of boards, which would have been seized a long time ago. The result of this audit does not inform about anything related to the allegations published by Bloomberg. I think it's more about re-building confidence by showing that Supermicro products on sale now can be trusted.
• elliekelly 8y ago
  When I worked as an attorney for a bank one of my jobs was to "manage" the audit engagements. When an audit has serious findings you can almost guarantee that's just the tip of the iceberg. On the other hand, an audit or review without any findings just means the company under review had some combination of good lawyers and friendly auditors. In my experience, there are two types of firms you can almost always find "friendly" auditors: law firms and small specialized "boutique" firms (accounting, consulting, etc). Who conducted this review? A boutique law firm.
• scarhill 8y ago
  WRT the how could they get it so wrong question, I guess it's time for the obligatory link to Michael Crichton's essay "Why Speculate?" and his discussion of the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" [1] Money quote: "You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. "In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." 1 - http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/ http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/
  • suls 8y ago
    Brilliant. Thanks for sharing this.
  • Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    I would expect newspapers to be more knowledgable about politics and international relations than scientific topics like physics. The latter is too broad a category, the former is usually the paper's primary focus.
    • hopler 8y ago
      Politics and International relations are opinion fields, not fact fields. It's impossible to be wrong about things that are impossible to falsify.
      • ufmace 8y ago
        I wouldn't quite say that. Some aspects are opinions, but there's plenty of facts. Such as "House Reps A and B are cooperating on a bill regarding X" - that's a fact. What your position on X is, whether the bill is a good or bad idea, and why A and B are cooperating on it are opinions.
• ineedasername 8y ago
  Or could an auditor simply miss it? If the functionality were part of another legitimate chip?
• John_KZ 8y ago
  Looking back at this after the Huawei scandal, it seems very likely it was a preliminary step to create a negative impression regarding Chinese manufacturing. Bloomberg could have been lied to, or been chosen to deliver false stories for propaganda. Of course it could be irrelevant (there were tensions regardless) but given how everything looks weird, it probably wasn't. Because no matter what the audits say, this article caused a widespread feeling of mistrust towards Chinese-manufactured electronics.
• chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  The problem with this line of reasoning -- "how do we know that each denial isn't just a sign of more coercion from powerful forces" -- isn't that it's impossible. It's that that it's unfalsifiable. I got into a brief argument in comments here not too long ago about the saying "you can't prove a negative" which got bogged down in (what I considered to be) pedantic semantics; what we mean in practice is this kind of "negative." Instead of the conspiracy-minded folks providing proof that powerful, shadowy forces have come out in force against Bloomberg to discredit and suppress their reporting on an actual national security incident, they're demanding that skeptics prove that they haven't. And how can we do this? The complete lack of evidence for this happening might just mean that the shadowy, powerful forces are really good at hiding their tracks. We can posit that if they were really that powerful, they'd have suppressed the original reporting, but we can't prove that Bloomberg didn't just get lucky, or that their diligent, plucky reporters didn't somehow catch the Deep State off-guard for just a moment. We can point out that generally when we see this kind of story, other reporters in other organizations would have corroborated and even expanded the story by now, and that other reporters have said that they've tried and failed to do so. But that might mean the conspiracy is covering their tracks. That they've got to them. That the rest of the journalistic world is IN ON THE CONSPIRACY, MAN. But it's also possible that the reason it increasingly looks like Bloomberg got played is that, well, Bloomberg got played. Like a cigar, sometimes a bad article is just a bad article.
• ggggtez 8y ago
  Could a TLA have silenced the real results? Sure, but that seems pretty unlikely. The US Government is not afraid to call out China for real or perceived threats right now (see tariffs). So the government itself silencing this would be pretty counter-intuitive. I'd believe more that Super Micro is trying to save it's stock value, more than I'd believe government intervention. Of course, it could also just be faulty intelligence. Guess we'll have to wait and see what Bloomberg does with respect to whether they can get their sources on the record.