Apple's top security chief told the U.S. Congress on Sunday that it had found no indication of suspicious transmissions or other evidence that its China supply chain was ever compromised (via Reuters).
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In a letter to the Senate and House commerce committees, Apple Vice President for Information Security George Stathakopoulos wrote that the company had repeatedly investigated and found no evidence to support Bloomberg Businessweek's bombshell report that alleged tiny chips were discovered inside Apple servers which allowed for backdoor transmissions to Chinese spies.
"Apple's proprietary security tools are continuously scanning for precisely this kind of outbound traffic, as it indicates the existence of malware or other malicious activity. Nothing was ever found," he wrote in the letter provided to Reuters.
Stathakopoulos repeated Apple's statements to the press that it had never found any such planted chips or been contacted by the FBI over the alleged matter. The letter follows a statement issued on Saturday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security saying it had no reason to doubt the companies who denied that they had ever discovered the tiny chips.
Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all strongly rebutted the report, which alleged that Chinese intelligence planted microchips in Supermicro servers, which Apple and Amazon previously used in their data centers.
Despite the denials, which are also backed by the UK's national cyber security agency, retired Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell, and other unnamed Apple senior executives, Bloomberg said it stood by its report as of Friday, but didn't immeditately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
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Top Rated Comments
There are many ways to mask communications. I'm not surprised they found nothing.
Name one undetectable by common practices.Fortune 500 companies employ teams of IT security experts. So please enlighten us armchair hacker.
No serious hacker enters through the front door. Thinking outside the box is all the fun. I mentioned the LZ4 frame format above, but even SSH, generally considered secure, also has the potential for abuse (although admittedly it is more difficult). The initial key exchange initialization (called a kexinit packet) contains some fields that are, in my experience, usually ignored. The potential is there for abuse as well. Generally, communication originating internally is a much more difficult thing to contain, but it certainly isn't impossible.
Wow a certification! How many *weeks* was the class for that? I mean the exam has 90 whole questions. :rolleyes::rolleyes: I'm actually Security+ certified, so maybe I know a little more than you do.
You know some people get whole degrees from accredited universities in this stuff.
Again you didn't list an undetectable way to communicate massive data with China. You listed areas that "abuse" could occur. Malware doing something is one thing. Malware on thousands of servers transmitting back to the motherland without any notice of the outbound traffic is something completely different.
That diagram and entire article looks like something out of a 1993 Popular Mechanics magazine.
And from a quick glance, it looks like the illustrations depict china hacking our pencils!