Red Security

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*To start this off, I want to say that this will be an ongoing story, as I intend to follow it and stay in the loop so that you, the reader, can stay informed.*

Last week, a story by Bloomberg came out stating that there had been a major breach of America's technological supply chain. They went to state that there were small mnicrochips, that had been planted in server motherboards. These chips were small, no bigger than a grain of rice. Now these motherboards, that were designed by a company called SuperMircro, never had any mircrochips in the original designs... SuperMicro has their motherboards manufactured in China. These servers were used quite widely by large tech giants and federal institutions. Of course, this rattled the FBI, and other agencies to scramble and contact Amazon, and Apple Inc. Since last week, this whole matter has been on-going.

On Sunday, Apple met with the U.S Congress. They went to firmly state that there was no signs of tampering, that could be found. Apple, Amazon, SuperMirco, and even China's Minister of Foreign Affairs have strongly denied any claims by the Bloomberg article. Apple's claim was put forth by their top security officer. Apple's VP for Information Security George Stathakopoulos, wrote a letter to the Senate and House commerce committee that they investigated the matter multiple times and every time they found no evidence of any tampering with their systems, this included no rogue traffic to or from their systems. They also stated:

"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."

The VP went to say that Apple also had never been in contact with the FBI at any point since last week. He stated that he would be available to brief Congressional staff on the matter this week. Up this point, denials from the three tech giants, have so far been backed by Britain's National Cyber Security Centre, as well the US Department of Homeland Security. They stated that they had no reason to doubt any denials from any of them.

While that may be so, that leaves China in an awkward spot... as their denials cannot be so easily passed off as believable given the state of their government. This also makes other matters, mainly involving China and the US, and an impending Trade War, a bit shaky.

Even though there have been denials that are being backed, Bloomberg stands by its story, stating that their story was based on 17 anonymous sources. This was countered in a letter by Apple saying that some of the allegations were based on fewer accounts and some were even a single unnamed account.

As I said, I will be keeping an eye on this story.

Okay, have a good week everyone, stay safe out there.

----Sh7nk-Z0id

Mad-Architect