The U.K.’s national cyber security agency has chimed in with its assessment of the recent report claiming that multiple companies — including Apple — had malicious chips inserted by Chinese spies into their computer systems.
Both Amazon and Apple, two of the companies named, have so far denied the claims. Now Britain’s National Cyber Security Center has said there’s no reason to doubt them.
“We are aware of the media reports but at this stage have no reason to doubt the detailed assessments made by AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Apple,” said the National Cyber Security Center. The National Cyber Security Center is a part of Britain’s eavesdropping agency, GCHQ.
“The NCSC engages confidentially with security researchers and urges anybody with credible intelligence about these reports to contact us,” it continued.
Did they or didn’t they?
The Bloomberg Businessweek report was published this week. It cited 17 sources, and claimed that China used “a tiny chip to infiltrate America’s top companies.” It suggests that thousands of server motherboards manufactured by Super Micro contained chips allowing spies to, “access high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks.”
If true, this would be one of the biggest tech stories of the year, or longer than that. However, both Apple and Amazon immediately sprang into action to deny that the story was accurate. Apple characterized the article as, “wrong and misinformed.” Amazon, meanwhile, noted that there, “are so many inaccuracies in this article as it relates to Amazon that they’re hard to count.”
Not everyone agrees, though. A former Apple engineer, who spent nearly six years at Apple working on the iPod, iPhone and Apple Watch, suggested that the claims sound, “very highly plausible.”
We’ll have to wait to see how this all plays out. But it sounds like some more information is needed to back up the claims before they’re taken more seriously by one of the world’s biggest cyber security groups!
Source: Reuters
