Bloomberg revealed that Beijing authorities used technology suppliers for long-term intelligence work. Former U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said it underscores the widespread risks in the global supply chain.
In 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense discovered that thousands of its computer servers were sending military network data to China, which was later found to be due to malicious code hidden in the chips that execute boot programs, the report said.
In 2014, semiconductor giant Intel discovered that a Chinese hacker group had used a server to compromise Intel’s network, and that the server downloaded malicious software from the website of a vendor that provided updates.
In 2015, the FBI warned several companies that Chinese Communist Spies had hidden a separate chip containing the back-end code in a manufacturer’s server.
The report said these incidents involved two common elements: the Chinese Communist Party and California-based Supermicro. Another feature is that U.S. intelligence units were aware of the incident, but kept it secret in an attempt to conduct counterintelligence work to get to the bottom of the Chinese Communist Party.
Jay Tabb, a former senior FBI official, noted that the Supermicro incident highlights the broader risks to the global supply chain.
Metso Micro perfectly illustrates the vulnerability of U.S. companies to potential malicious tampering if they choose to manufacture any product in China,” Tabb said. Without complete oversight of where products are manufactured, this is a worst-case scenario example.”
“The Chinese Communist government has been doing this for a long Time, and companies must understand that the Communist Party is still doing it. Silicon Valley in particular cannot pretend that this is not happening right now.”
The report also noted that neither US Supermicro nor its employees have been charged with any illegal conduct, and the former U.S. official interviewed for the report emphasized that US Supermicro itself is not the target of any counterintelligence investigation.
In response to Bloomberg’s inquiries, Super Micro said it has never been contacted by the U.S. government or the company’s customers about these alleged investigations. Metso Micro said Bloomberg has assembled some wildly different and inaccurate allegations and made far-fetched conclusions.
U.S. federal agencies, including those under investigation in the report, continue to purchase U.S. Supermicro products, U.S. Supermicro said.
A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the allegations in the article are an attack on the Chinese Communist Party, attempting to “discredit the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese enterprises” and accusing U.S. officials of fabricating facts to hype the “Chinese Communist threat theory.
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