I really have little doubt that the Chinese are integrating their spy chips into computer hardware going to the big four or even the pentagon. It's probably how they stole the designs to the f-35[you know that plane that costs over a trillion dollars to develop]. It would catastrophic if apple knew or even acknowledges the possibility of the Chinese having a backdoor into their servers and would result in massive shift in policy[+profit].
The NSA has been known to intercept electronics in shipping and putting in their own specialized pcb board replacements with microphones, cameras, etc. and are _very_ hard to detect. Hell the Russian even went back to typewriters for security purposes[0]. It would be foolish to think that the Chinese/Russians aren't doing the same thing to us.
I stand corrected but it's still a ridiculous high price to develop a plane and then have the plans simply stolen. What's the difference between the Chinese stealing a half billion dollars and stealing the designs of these plans that cost around that amount? Consequentially, probably not much.
Saying "The Chinese are probably doing something bad" is very different from the very specific accusations that were made; "The Chinese are doing the same thing to us" is not a news story - what was reported by Bloomberg was a news story.
My point is that hand wavy "they have to be spying somewhere" is in no way a defense for the Bloomberg story. My reason why I'm very skeptical of the story is that I think it would be possible that SOMEONE would have physical evidence of it (given that it was a hardware hack) that they could show. So far Bloomberg hasn't really shown anything to back up their story.
I don't do chip decapping but from the looks of it[0], it's incredibly hard and time consuming. They would have to do it to every server.
It would be easier to suggest that there's no actual guarantees of hardware security these companies can make unless I am missing something. I am not a computer engineer nor do I have I worked in secops at any of these companies.
Why are you posting the exact same comment you posted three days ago word for word?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18259097
Are you conducting some kind of controlled experiment and using HN commenters as lab rats?
Well if they actually had 3 high level sources on inside, which they probably did as they are a very reputable news org, then they had every right to post the story.
People need to realize that if what they are saying is true, this is huge.
From the article, "he managed to steal 630,000 files from Boeing's system, totalling some 65 gigabytes of data, from 2010 onwards. A report prepared by the hackers reads that "experts inside China have a high opinion" about the data on the C-17, and that they "were the first ever seen in the country.""
The NSA has been known to intercept electronics in shipping and putting in their own specialized pcb board replacements with microphones, cameras, etc. and are _very_ hard to detect. Hell the Russian even went back to typewriters for security purposes[0]. It would be foolish to think that the Chinese/Russians aren't doing the same thing to us.
[0]:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/101...