Both Apple and Amazon found the surreptitious chip hidden on motherboards they were buying from Elemental Systems/Supermicro, a server assembler who bought hardware from Supermicro which had its motherboards made in China by a generic subcontractor. Apple was going to buy 30,000 rack mount high-speed broadband video servers from Elemental Systems in 2015-2016 for their iCloud/iTunes streaming movie service and, like Amazon got some reference sample machines for teardown testing. Per Bloomberg Businessnews:
"One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the next year."
From what I can see, Apple cancelled that order and went with another supplier, one without a Supermicro motherboard. However Amazon went ahead and acquired the entire company of Elemental Systems in 2015 and bought Supermicro motherboards, subsuming them into the Amazon structure under Amazon Web Services (AWS). Apple may actually have cancelled that order because Amazon acquired Elemental and Supermicro was going to dedicate their production and the Elemental software to their purposes for expansion of AWS and Amazon Prime video which was growing rapidly.
All three companies deny there was ever a problem, denying the single source Bloomberg businessnews story which, as a MSM news source, is as usual citing anonymous sources at the companies and in government for their story . . . saying, . . “It’s untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise, an issue with malicious chips, or hardware modifications when acquiring Elemental,” Amazon wrote. “On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, ‘hardware manipulations’ or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server,” Apple wrote. “We remain unaware of any such investigation,” wrote a spokesman for Supermicro, Perry Hayes.
Apple and Amazon further stated today as quoted in a CNBC article:
“Apple has issued strong denials of the report, stating: ‘We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg‘s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple,'” Fazzini reports. “AWS has also denied the report according to a statement published by Bloomberg, saying: ‘We’ve found no evidence to support claims of malicious chips or hardware modifications.'”
AWS has also denied the report, telling CNBC in a statement,
"As we shared with Bloomberg BusinessWeek multiple times over the last couple months, at no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified hardware or malicious chips in SuperMicro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon systems."
As I pointed out in the Q LexiQn on this claim, Apple designs its own logic boards with the boards being multi layered, making the inclusion of an additional chip a not inconsequential proposition, requiring a re-engineering of the entire board to accommodate the new addition. Apple is also fully in charge of their own quality control for their products, with a detailed computerized comparison done on every logic board to assure that it matches specifications when it comes out of manufacture. In addition, Apple designs each of the processors and many of the ICs on their mobile devices as Systems on a Chip (SoC) by hand, not computer designed, and it would be nearly impossible for any Chinese agency to add something to a chip (it would have to be done at the design stage). Any surreptitiously added IC would raise a red flag in the quality control checks done on every Apple product. Also, Apple does not use third-party reference design motherboards as do many PC manufacturers, who often buy parts such as motherboards and logic boards from multiple suppliers of which there are many such generic makers in China.
The fact is that most motherboards these days are also multilayer and must be engineered from day one with all intended chips in mind. Just adding one at the point of manufacture is not really possible unless it was designed to be there from the beginning. You can't just change the motherboard design at the last minute to stitch another IC on it. Not one of these articles shows a photo of the suspect chip in situ. Something smells here! That's a red flag for me. Don't tell me it's there, show me the damn thing! That said, Apple and its supply partners all took a stock hit today due to this article. . . which given its single source nature from Bloomberg and anonymous sources for quotations, with denials from the principal companies involved, may in fact be FAKE NEWS.