Monday, October 8, 2018

Apple Denies "Spy Chip" Story

You may have already been following this, but Apple has now denied the Bloomberg spy chip story a couple of times. Here's my original post, Has Your Electronic Hardware Been Hacked?, and the original Bloomberg post, The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies. Techcrunch has a prior story with links to more of the denials.

While I'm in no position to know whether the story is valid or not, it can be an interesting exercise thinking about why the various respective parties might have an interest in denying the story. Similarly, it's probably worth spending a bit of time thinking about why, if it isn't true, the story was published and what might be behind it.

All of that being said, thematically, concerns about technology back doors being placed into electronic devices -- and the implications of these vectors -- will continue to be an ongoing theme.

Caveat Emptor.

------- Update:  ----------

You may find this to be pushing into the "conspiracy" end of the spectrum, but here's an interesting look into some of the nuances of the language of rebuttals from the Emptywheel blog. There's also a good breakout of the story into a timeline with links to some of the stories at the time they emerged (I found the Apple, SuperMicro firmware thread to be particularly interesting.

Rattled: China’s Hardware Hack 

There are more posts breaking down the language in some of the denials, but this one has the timeline.

No comments: