Bloomberg’s exposure on hacking chip installed in the main server’s motherboard from China had produced great repercussions. The exposure was mainly accusing China is behind on hacking chip installation and the servers with those chips are all over the US, especially might have affected Amazon and Apple.
I doubt that this hacking chip has the capability for what Bloomberg was accused of. Also, Bloomberg only showed the photo of the chip that was used without its legs that should have used to attached to the motherboard. If the chip can do what the exposure is claiming, it needs at least more than 100 legs as a control, address, and data lines, that are connected to the mainboard’s memory, and if they were able to implement connections with few pins, this would not really follow or matching with system’s memory clock. Maybe in Wakanda, this kind of legless tiny chip that can hack everything without connected to actual memory can be realized. In addition to this, I believe this kind of hardware installation hacking method is not that clever way to do, because, even if they are hard to be detected, but when they got caught, it just gives every technology information, trails of where it came from with the hardware.
Although Bloomberg’s accusation is a bit dramatic, it is valuable because it made recognize to the US and many people in the world, that they should concern about their technology supply chain and its vulnerability. Close monopoly market on the production of tech-components in China can become a more serious threat, therefore, company-wise and nation-wise reconsideration and counterplans are needed. I believe many countries that rely on the monopolistic market for their supplies should start to think of developing a certain amount of productions on their own, especially for the sensitive components.
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Politically, the timing of this article release was perfect for the current administration to pursue their agenda regards to China, but also can be good leverage to companies to divert their production lines back to the US. Forensically, this article gives significance to hardware vulnerability. Hardware forensics should not be neglected as well as all software forensics. Amazon and Apple could be free from the article’s accusation because after this exposure went out, they announced the refutation of their accusations, and Bloomberg had not really given counterevidence to disproof their announcement yet. However, as I mentioned above, they should be aware of this type of attacks and be ready and plan to countermeasures for future threats.
