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The manipulation of China's supply chains for electronic products to US companies may pose long-standing questions about the crucial but difficult relationship between the two major economies of the world. (AP Photo / Ng Han Guan)
China has secretly inserted surveillance chips into servers used by large technology companies, including Apple and Amazon.com, as part of a bold military operation likely to fuel trade tensions between US-based companies. United and its leading source of electronic components and products, Bloomberg Businessweek announced Thursday morning. .
According to the report, the extent of data collected by China from the surveillance chips was unclear and no consumer information had been stolen, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. But he said that a top secret US government investigation, dating back to 2015 and involving the FBI, remains open.
The story quotes 17 anonymous sources, including industry insiders and current and former US officials. The Chinese government, Apple, Amazon and other companies involved have challenged the report to Bloomberg Businessweek, and intelligence officials from the FBI and the US have declined to comment.
A US official said Thursday morning at the Washington Post that Bloomberg Businessweek reports were accurate. This person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss unapproved topics for publication.
The report was released just hours before Vice President Pence issued a brutal reprimand against China in a speech at the Hudson Institute in Washington. Pence was to issue a series of criticisms of what the Trump administrations regard as China's increasingly aggressive behavior, including President Trump's allegations last week that the country is meddling in the mid-term elections to the states. -United.
The United States and China are plunged into a bitter and growing trade war in which hundreds of billions of US and Chinese products are subject to tariffs.
The reported cases of manipulation of electronic supply chains by US companies will certainly add to the longstanding questions about the crucial but difficult relationship between the two major world economies. US companies design and sell advanced technology products, such as servers, laptops and smartphones, but they are built and assembled mainly in China.
US officials have long been worried about the possibility that altered microchips or other components will be secretly inserted into products and shipped to the United States and elsewhere, paving the way for long spying. term users of computers and their information networks.
Monitoring using modified hardware is harder to perform than more familiar computer hacks, but the results may be harder to fix because the components need to be detected and physically removed, or the use of the material must be interrupted. The surveillance microchips could have connected to external computers and secretly download software to bypass security protections, such as passwords or encryption keys, stored elsewhere on the affected servers, thereby allowing spying. computerized remote.
The operation, which Bloomberg Businessweek attributed to a Chinese military computer piracy unit, involved inserting a tiny, innocuous microchip on motherboards into servers produced by Supermicro, a leading provider of such equipment. based in San Jose. The company is American but motherboards have been assembled mainly in China.
Apple and Amazon discovered the surveillance chips in 2015 and took steps to replace the servers involved, according to the report, which describes close cooperation between US investigators and the companies involved. According to the report, dozens of companies could have used sabotaged servers in their data centers before the Chinese operation was detected.
On Thursday morning, Apple made reference to the Washington Post on its statement in the Bloomberg Businessweek case, alleging that the information provided was inaccurate. "Apple has never found malicious fleas," hardware tampering "or intentional vulnerabilities on a server – Apple has never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any FBI investigations, nor are our contacts in law enforcement. "
The report also cites the denial of information reported by Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon's cloud services, which acquired in 2015 a company, Elemental, whose servers would have been affected by Chinese activities. (The Washington Post belongs to Amazon's general manager, Jeff Bezos.)
"Since we have shared several times with Bloomberg BusinessWeek in the last two months, at no point in the past or present have we encountered a problem with modified hardware or malicious chips on motherboards. SuperMicro of Elemental or Amazon systems, "said AWS in a statement.
Supermicro said in its statement: "We are not aware of any investigation on this topic and no government agency has contacted us about it."
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