Hello, welcome to the Friday, October 5th, 2018 edition of the Sansonet Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, and I'm recording from Honolulu, Hawaii.

John Robertson and Michael Riley published an article with Bloomberg's Business Week today that alleges that the Chinese military

compromised motherboards from Super Micro by implanting special hardware backdoors.

Now, all companies named in the article as being affected, most notably Apple, Amazon,

and Super Micro itself did publish statements denying that anything

like this was happening. Now, Apple mentioned, and this was already well known, that in 2016,

they did have some issues with drivers supplied by Supermicro that turned out to be backdoored.

But Apple also stated that they never came across a hardware backdoor as described in this article. Now according to the Bloomberg article,

this entire issue was discovered in 2015 when Amazon purchased Elemental Technologies.

Elemental Technologies does produce video streaming servers that made use of Super Micro Motherboards and when Amazon did its due diligence

on the company, they came across these back doors. Now Amazon again states that this was

not a case. They did their diligence here.

They found some issues with super micro equipment, but according to Amazon, this was more with

web portals and the like, and all these issues had been addressed by now.

None of the sources that the reporters interviewed for the article are named.

They mention that they reviewed some documents, but none of these documents are reproduced

as part of the article. The article does show an image of a small chip, sort of the tip of a pencil size, it's actually displayed sort of next to a

pencil to sort of make the point. It's however not clear if this image is the actual chip

found on the motherboards or if this is just a random component that is used for illustration.

And to me it actually looks more like the later.

But regardless all of this, what really matters is,

do you have to worry about it?

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