“China inserted surveillance microchip in servers used by Amazon, Apple”

Scoop, ... 4 comments.

The article detailed a sweeping, years-long effort to install the surveillance chips in servers whose motherboards – the brains of the powerful computers – were assembled in China.

Apple did not mince words in their rebuttal:

“Over the course of the past year, Bloomberg has contacted us multiple times with claims, sometimes vague and sometimes elaborate, of an alleged security incident at Apple. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them. We have repeatedly and consistently offered factual responses, on the record, refuting virtually every aspect of Bloomberg’s story relating to Apple.”

From the comment section:

In the story, it was confirmed which secondary shops were doing this, and that they were forced, by threat of shutdown, to add the component by third parties. The denials by Apple and Amazon are SOP to prevent loss of confidence from investors.

What they are showing has six connections, this is enough for JTAG  which is a standard interface to let you do anything and everything. It could be directly receptive to a certain radio frequency, the size would suggest microwave, to let you feed data directly through JTAG via microwave RF.

Even if the component is innocuous, they shouldn’t be modifying a board without approval from the client. An innocuous component can also be a test to see if they can slip something into a board.

We worked with China all the time, we never expect them to honour any kind of confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements, and made sure what they were given were always small pieces of a whole: just the radio board, just the power supply, etc. then put in the proprietary stuff like ROMs locally.