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SOX requires the president of a company to sign off on the accuracy of the financial data—not that they had an embedded circuit that was secretly added by suppliers in China.

You may be thinking only about the accounting aspects of SOX, there are other sections, one having to do with communications and another with evidence.

The CEO, president, and other officers of a corporation (I know, I've held each of those positions in corporations) has always had a fiduciary responsibility that the financial statements of a corporation were true and accurate and not fraudulent. . . SOX made no change in that except to criminalize and increase the penalties and add lower level managers. . . and management people and corporate officers have been convicted of SOX violations because communications have financial impacts on the valuation of the stocks. I've read the entire law. Have you? Communication that has to do with the truthfulness and transparency of any statement made by a publicly traded corporation that may negatively affect the value of the company is also part of Sarbanes Oxley. . . and this certainly would.

Would it surprise you to learn that Sarbanes Oxley was successfully used against the captain of a commercial fishing boat, certainly NOT the president of the company, for "shredding" some undersized red grouper fish (actually throwing the undersized live red groupers back into the sea, as the law required). He was convicted under a SOX provision that prohibited the "shredding" of any "tangible object" that might be used in a Federal Sarbanes Oxley investigation, as an inspector had decided the red grouper were slightly undersized and ordered they be brought back to shore for further measurement (these 72 groupers out of several thousand, were a fraction of an inch under the 20" size the law required, according to the enforcement officer) as evidence of undersize fishing, rather than being just tossed back as the law required of undersized fish. Really, SOX applied to a low-level manager? Yup, they did. That one made it all the way to the US Supreme Court.

SOX was also invoked on a company for making the statement that it was legal to import crabs in burlap sacks not boxes. . . (it actually was). . . Legal costs pushed the company into bankruptcy from which it did not recover.

They have also applied SOX to corporate statements or communications by officers or managers that were later found to be deliberately false that had negative impact on stock valuation.

Sarbanes Oxley was absurdly invoked in the Boston Marathon Bombing case against the roommate of one of the bombers for merely moving a backpack from his room. . . and it includes ANOTHER fisherman case. . . Such is the overreach of Federal Prosecutors and their eagerness to read into SOX because of its poorly written sections.

It is one of the reasons that Apple seldom responds to any requests for comments on what it is doing. It is better to stand mute than to risk saying something that later can be challenged when Apple changes its corporate mind about something and is then accused of lying under SOX. Yet HERE both Apple and Amazon made official statements of fact.

Sarbanes Oxley does not apply to just the "president" of a company signing off on financial statements, but to all officers and management of a company and official communications of that company. The test is did the statement or the communications have a negative impact on the valuation of the stock due to misrepresentation or falsehood of what they said or communicated. SOX has been interpreted to mean going beyond normal product puffing, etc., to deliberate misrepresentation of factual data.

I.E. A false statement CAN have an intentional financial impact that benefits the company or the utterer to the fraudulent detriment of the investors. If that can be proved to be the case, then Sarbanes Oxley can be invoked against the company or the individual manager or officer. . . and has been.

In this instance, as I stated above, Apple and Amazon have released OFFICIAL statements on the FACTS about the Supermicro servers. In Apple's case on servers they would have been using had they NOT cancelled the order; on AWS' case on Supermicro servers they ARE using. Those facts COULD significantly impact the valuation of each company's stock and in fact HAS so impacted stock valuation and the stock of their supply chains. . . In Apple's case AAPL lost almost 3% ($30 BILLION in valuation) after Bloomberg's article came out and their supply chain lost over $10 BILLION of value in just one day, all on the say-so of unattributed anonymous sources from a single news source with a history of FAKE NEWS! I repeat, what incentive would Apple and Amazon have to lie?

You can tell the quality of your argument when you devolved to argument ad hominem with the "inflated ego" attack. Not even a good try.

Pardon me, ConservativeMind, I was wrong when I stated $10 billion in Apple's supply chain was destroyed by Bloomberg's article. It's gone up. . . and it isn't even Apple's suppliers who were supposedly doing it.

Apple Suppliers Took an $18 Billion Stock Hit After the China Hacking Report
Barrons
By Al Root
Updated Oct. 5, 2018 4:45 a.m. ET
Thursday’s report from Bloomberg Businessweek that Chinese chips were installed in the hardware of companies like Apple and Amazon.com could have significant implications for tech supply chains.
Consider: Apple (ticker: AAPL) is a $1 trillion company, and its hardware supply chain amounts to another trillion or so in market cap. Those companies have about $1 trillion in assets listed on the books. Though it’s difficult to get precise numbers, Apple’s suppliers domiciled outside Southeast Asia probably own about $300 billion in assets there.
For instance, Intel (INTC) lists 15% of assets in “other locations” outside of the U.S., Europe, and Israel. Presumably, those assets are in Southeast Asia, but Intel’s filings don’t provide the details. If the security zeitgeist begins to require more technology production to be done in the U.S., the implied shift in capital spending by the region could be material.
The market, however, has taken just $18 billion or so in value from the hardware suppliers since the story broke earlier today, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM), down 3.5% to $42.43, among the hardest hit. To put that in perspective, Equifax (EFX) remains down about 12% from its all-time high, presumably because of the impact from its September 2017 data breach.
There are good reasons not to jump to conclusions. Apple and Amazon (AMZN) are denying the reports, and the market might be having a difficult time pinpointing who’s to blame. It’s not entirely clear which point of the chain was breached and just how much it will hurt suppliers. We can also envision a scenario where this hack turns into a bargaining chip for the U.S. during trade negotiations with China. Still, that less-than-2% stock value hit could be too small, given the implications of the news.
There are still more questions than answers. But the issue is sure to become a hot topic during the coming third-quarter earnings season.