Off the top of my head from that time, I remember they asked someone about the plausibility of some part of the story about the component types that might have been altered, he pointed them at some random example from Digi-Key, and that example became their photoshoot prop.

All of their photos were provably fake and staged, and made no technical sense.

There was that whole sub-story about how supposedly Ethernet jacks having metal shields was one of the indicators of compromise (what? almost every piece of datacenter kit uses Ethernet jacks with metal shields).

The more you looked into the details, the less they added up.

The only thing we could confirm was that, at some point, Supermicro shipped compromised drivers. That part I can absolutely believe, and like the last bit of this story update claims, that may well have been an APT hack from a state-actor. That side of the story is entirely believable and self-consistent.

But the hardware modifications? Sorry, but the way that story has been reported is complete garbage. I'm not saying it isn't true, I'm saying Bloomberg provided no credible evidence that it is true, and plenty of evidence that they don't have the slightest clue what they're doing, and that their reporting is dishonest.

Originally I gave them the benefit of the doubt, but when they published the Ethernet jack story with less than 5 days to check anything from that guy, they lost all semblance of credibility.

IMHO Bloomberg is trying to break this story without giving malicious actors useful information.

As a proof of concept experiment, I hacked together an Mcu, a few caps, resistors, diodes, and a small power transistor to see what could be done on a "single component" attack. I was able to receive data and inject malicious messaging into the data from a serial eeprom using a "filter capacitor" made up of my device (only 2 wires, 1 to signal, 1 to ground)

Obviously, not having access to a fab or able to integrate microscale circuits, my device would have been trivially detected (about 1 cubic centimeter) but with access to a fab and a bespoke lab, I have no doubt it could be manufactured down to the size of a standard filter capacitor (~3mm3).

I do not know if this is what malicious actors would do or not, but if I can build a 2 wire device to compromise the data loaded from serial flash, then any state actor can. If you compromise this data on the control firmware for a PC, you own the board.

All of the claims that the hardware attack is fanciful are clearly naieve, based on my experiment.

It is worth mentioning that the attack that I experimentally replicated is the hard version. The easy one is to substitute a modified device for the serial eeprom itself... Also invisible, and orders of magnitude more potent. A compromised eeprom could include advanced features including large amounts of storage and built in rf communication capabilities.

The naysayers in this case saying that the attack would be technically infeasible or excessively difficult to implement undetected are simply wrong from a technical point of view.

Compromised devices could be mass manufactured for < 10usd each, and if you can get a reel of them into a manufacturers supply chain, you can permenantly compromise thousands of devices with a single attack. The required tech is within reach of any state actor with access to a fab.

This is irelevant to the article though. The article was clearly written by someone who didn't even know what an Ethernet cable looks like and someone who provided fake photos for the article. It makes no difference if it could have happened to the clearly fakenews article. There's a discussion to be had about the implecications of something like this happening but baseing it on a fluff piece is not the way to get anything useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog

There's pricing from 2008 so you can be sure it's 10x smaller now.

What kind of useful information?

What classes of information wouldn't be immediately useful, but would be useful in aggregate?

If your premise is that the article might tip off attackers to the idea that they have been caught, these points are moot. Either they have been caught, or the article is actually bullshit.

But that's okay, I'm going to hold your hand for a bit. Pretend the article said "three hidden microphones were found to be added to this board." That tells the attacker which board is being tested, that they are testing for microphones, and how many of their microphones have been found.

If your job is to hide microphones every day, do you see how this information could help you moving forward? Do you see why this is more than a binary caught/not caught?

Yes, it’s possible there is more than one attack and they want to avoid revealing which ones have been detected.

This may be the class of information they are protecting.

If so, the journalism leaves us in the same position as the attackers - the number of attacks we know have been detected is in the range 0 - n.

I.e. it’s possible the article is complete bullshit. Another possibility is that the article is itself disinformation. If attackers can’t tell then neither can we.

What it is not, is a news story we can trust.

Okay, that's fair.

Your question was about what kinds of information an attacker can use. I didn't think of your question in the context of the entire article being disinformation.

I need to think more about that.

>Yes, it’s possible there is more than one attack and they want to avoid revealing which ones have been detected.

>This may be the class of information they are protecting.

>There was no reason not to answer straightforwardly at the beginning. Weird that you didn’t.

I'm glad I didn't, and I'm glad you took the time to puzzle that through.

>Nice try

You want to give your attacker as little information as possible. Even information about the kinds of information you're restricting can be used against you.

I didn’t puzzle anything through. I just kept asking until you responded straightforwardly.

I just wanted to know what classes of information people thought the journalists might be protecting.

>Nice try

> You want to give your attacker as little information as possible. Even information about the kinds of information you're restricting can be used against you.

At some level yes, but not at the level of this discussion. The ideas we’re talking about here are widely present even in pop-culture.

I just made a joke. You didn't get it (?), so I encouraged you to think through some possible answers to your own question. If you can think of more than one class of information that you wouldn't want your attacker to know you have, then you can arrive at the punchline yourself.

It's not too late to try it, by the way. Thinking like the attacker is a good exercise. The attacker doesn't even have to be real.

>At some level yes, but not at the level of this discussion. The ideas we’re talking about here are widely present even in pop-culture.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but operational security would still apply even when you have to make press releases. Companies juggle this all the time, e.g. sharing just enough about their proprietary technology to attract new employees/customers without giving everything away.

If you really were making a joke, you could have just said so when I ‘didn’t get it’. I’d probably have said something like ‘fair play’, or ‘nice’.

Because you didn’t we are left with other possibilities to consider:

1. You were just being condescending from the beginning, and are now trying to claim it was a joke to save face.

2. It was a bad joke, and you doubled down on condescension to save face.

The evidence supports either of these because ‘encouraging someone to think something through’ when you haven’t engaged in good faith conversation is an ignorant and condescending move.

Have you considered the possibility that I am asking what other people think because I want to know what other people think, and that ‘being encouraged to think it through’ will simply not answer that question?

There is nothing to suggest that you are an expert on this topic. Your own knowledge of it is limited despite having ‘thought it through’, proven by the fact that my response to your first real answer immediately showed you had missed something.

There is nothing wrong with making jokes, even bad ones, but following up with condescension makes it look like you weren’t actually joking.

We’ll never know now.

> I'm not sure what you mean by this, but operational security would still apply even when you have to make press releases.

Are you trying to create the impression that you are in personal possession of secrets about this attack?

Lol ok

>Have you considered the possibility that I am asking what other people think because I want to know what other people think, and that ‘being encouraged to think it through’ will simply not answer that question?

Had you considered the possibility that you asked a low-effort question? "What kind of useful information [might malicious actors look for]?" is about as deep as "hey how long should my password be". You are on Hacker News. I honestly thought you were joking when you asked it.

Do you really just want to talk about how the article makes China look bad? That's legit, but not at all related to the question you asked.

>There is nothing to suggest that you are an expert on this topic. Your own knowledge of it is limited despite having ‘thought it through’, proven by the fact that my response to your first real answer immediately showed you had missed something.

Nobody said I'm an expert? You asked about very basic threat modeling and I tried to walk you through a very basic exercise.

The thing I missed (the article itself is disinformation) wouldn't actually change much about the threat model. The writers still have to decide what/how much information about their business practices to share, and the attackers still gather every bit of info they can. The attack in the article could be a lie. The article could still accidentally revealed something new (or confirm something old) to any potential attackers. If the article mentions a specific factory, for example, another data point an adversary can use to model their supply chain. If it mentions a name and that name leads to a LinkedIn profile, the attackers get a little bit of the company's org chart. Those little leaks add up and must be actively managed.

>There is nothing wrong with making jokes, even bad ones, but following up with condescension makes it look like you weren’t actually joking. We’ll never know now.

I invite you to puzzle that one through yourself :-)

>Are you trying to create the impression that you are in personal possession of secrets about this attack?

Lol

As I said - condescending - and now we can see that your answer was in bad faith. That’s not encouraged on hacker news.

> "What kind of useful information [might malicious actors look for]?" is about as deep as "hey how long should my password be". You are on Hacker News. I honestly thought you were joking when you asked it.

Obviously not. You can’t claim to know much about the subject.

> is about as deep as "hey how long should my password be"

You don’t actually know what range of answers a good faith commenter might have.

You are simply confirming that your response was in bad faith, as it appeared.

> Do you really just want to talk about how the article makes China look bad?

What are you talking about?

Lol I stopped reading here

Instead, it means "to give you an image to rest your eyes on, so reading all of these annoying letters doesn't make them catch on fire" or something.

This is so weird.

Definition of illustrative : serving, tending, or designed to illustrate

illustrative examples

art that is illustrative of provincial life

"Hitler was a really bad man. Here is a picture of Hackernews user `kenneth` for illustrative purposes."

Something like that happened in France a few years ago. A TV channel illustrated a news segment about cybercrime with the first B-roll of computers they could put their hands on. It turned out to be shots from a segment on a not-for-profit org teaching computer skills to the poor (including former inmates). The org was pissed, the TV channel just said it was "for illustrative purposes", as if that was justification enough.

When reporting that someone has been arrested, indicted or is under investigation for such crimes newspapers aren't actually alleging that they did the thing. That seems quite different from what happened here.

It's not just that - it's that no other reputable outlet was able to confirm the story, and many tried. This just doesn't happen with controversial but true stories with many sources - some of those sources will be willing to talk to other outlets.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/chinese-suppl...

As others have pointed out, the problem was not (just) with lack of sources, but with the fact that the few technical details they gave didn't make sense. As a result, the article read like it was written by someone who was completely ignorant and was just not credible on the face of it.

in my book that counts as "concrete proof."

I think it's fair to say there are multiple circumstantial pieces of evidence that SuperMicro is inserting security vulnerabilities.

That should be enough to take the same decision that both the US gov't and Apple and others have made to avoid that manufacturer.

An unnamed "adviser" to security firms that analyzed Supermicro equipment. An executive for some unnamed company, who received a briefing. A venture capitalist who received a briefing. A retired FBI agent who was told there was an "additional little component" by someone he can't name. Some former FBI officials that refuse to name supermicro, and say only that supply chain attacks are possible. Fifty interviews with officials, all of whom asked not to be named.

So apparently this information is so public that everyone and their dog is happy confirm it - yet at the same time, so classified that the victims and the 50 sources can't be named?

That's pretty vague compared reports of hardware implants like credit card skimmers [1] which put pictures of the hardware front and centre and make it clear that the author has personally seen it and knows (basically) how it works.

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/all-about-skimmers/

> “This was espionage on the board itself,” said Mukul Kumar, who said he received one such warning during an unclassified briefing in 2015 when he was the chief security officer for Altera Corp., a chip designer in San Jose. “There was a chip on the board that was not supposed to be there that was calling home—not to Supermicro but to China.”

second, the article presents a plausible scenario for why it would be difficult to get additional details: the U.S. govt's strategy for dealing with this was to let it play out, so they could learn more about the nature of the threat. any public disclosures about this are at odds with the strategy of the U.S. government in combating it.

it seems like a very realistic scenario to me that some of the details of what happened became "lost in translation" - but that there is a real underlying truth. the first article wasn't convincing to me, but this one is very difficult to dismiss.

A person who "received a warning in an unclassified briefing" isn't first-hand. At best it's second-hand, if whoever analysed the hardware implant was going out giving briefings in person. More likely it's third-hand.

> it seems like a very realistic scenario to me that some of the details of what happened became "lost in translation"

If the claim was an evil driver update, or a backdoored BIOS, that would be completely believable.

Indeed, most of the details of this attack could just be a miscommunication about a BIOS backdoor - supply chain attack, malicious, code that shouldn't have been there, stored in an eeprom on the motherboard, undetectable by visual inspection.

But the much more astonishing claim of a malicious hardware implant between layers of a PCB? Something that surprising needs the testimony of an electronics expert, not a cop or a C-suite officer. Especially after the purported victims from the first article denied knowing anything about it.

do you agree the article establishes that the U.S. govt repeatedly warned private sector companies that supermicro servers had been bugged by china? maybe the us govt was wrong about that! could be! but it's still a huge story and much more than what was established by the first bloomberg article.

I agree the article establishes that unnamed sources in government are giving out briefings.

But I don't think that was ever in doubt.

Even when the first article was written, I could easily believe the journalist's claim they were told what they wrote by some sketchy anonymous government source. I just think they didn't demonstrate the truth of their source's claim.

There's always some anonymous "senior government official" ready to tell a journalist that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (but they can't show the evidence as it's classified) or whatever other narrative they're pushing at the time. It's a journalist's responsibility to apply due skepticism.

for whatever reason, you are refusing to grapple with the fact that the second, just-released article, does not rely on the testimony of anonymous government sources, "sketchy" or otherwise, but on multiple, named, private sector sources. the people who are quoted have reputations that are important to them. they are claiming to have participated in concrete events. it's a very different category of testimony than "government sources say."

The first article relied on briefings from unnamed government sources.

The second article has named private sector sources who say "an unnamed government source briefed me too"

That's just anonymous government sources, but with extra steps.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-severed-ties-w...

Why do you completely cut tie with a big supplier over security concerns and at the same time don't disclose why? I'd say this is exceptional in the business of IT-security.

Everything that would be done with the extra component could more easily be done with BIOS code, attracting no attention. So it doesn't pass the sniff test.

i.e. "had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that would record all the data"

... one does not simply ... encrypt a chip ...

With these kinds of explanations or statements used as evidence, it's frustrating trying to figure out what "really happened". Personally, I don't doubt there's something to all of this. It's a "real threat" as has been reported; whether or not it's "theoretically real" or "actually used" isn't that relevant: if it's a "real threat" someone has figured out precisely how to do it or has seen it (or close-enough variations of the "it") being done that it's worth taking action.

My hunch is that it's a firmware-related hack; no hardware added to the boards. The article talks around BIOS and such, indicating that some of the code involved was inserted by employees directly connected to the company. It explains the lack of photographic evidence--what's the evidence[0]? And wouldn't the attacker prefer it that way? It also helps explain the "encrypted chip" -- perhaps code, encrypted on the chip (decrypted/executed at boot) was what was intended by that statement[1].

[0] Disassembled code on Github would have been nice, but the US government isn't likely to drop that.

[1] And maybe it was said in that bizarre manner intentionally, who knows?

This is tricky because on newer platforms the BIOS is signed and verified by the CPU. The signing keys are likely going to be located in the engineering offices (in the US) rather than just lying around in the factories, so getting them would require much more access than just bribing/threatening a few technicians at the factory.

> attracting no attention. So it doesn't pass the sniff test.

Compromised BIOS is a known threat, so I'd presume paranoid customers would verify/reflash the BIOS upon receiving them. This can be done without booting the motherboard at all (ie. attaching SPI clips to the flash chip and reading/writing directly). A tampered bios would get detected this way so it's not exactly "no attention".

Strong dissenting views is a means to an end, not an end.

The truth is some point in the space of plausible ideas. If the region covered by existing ideas doesn't overlap the truth, then yes, you need to expand it. If it does, then looking elsewhere is guaranteed to bring you farther away from the truth.

If the story is false (or, more precisely, Bloomberg's reporters are talking to people who aren't technically qualified to analyze the subject and are misinterpreting it and Bloomberg is putting its own spin of misinterpretation on it), then Bloomberg's contribution to the discourse - to the pursuit of truth - is of no more value than the National Enquirer saying that Batboy hacked all our computers. Possibly of less value, in that people know not to take the Enquirer seriously.

The ability to have a wide range of views expressed is good for the pursuit of truth, yes. That doesn't mean that a dissenting view is of merit because it is dissenting. And in the case of this article, when it was based on a previous one that was attacked on the merits and not because of how dissenting it was, and seems to be more of the same, a commitment to the search for truth requires us to dismiss it.

In this case Bloomberg comes back with the vengeance, but we need to see if it will picked up or will be buried again.

You can't say something like this about Bloomberg News and what happened with the Bloomberg presidential campaign and have credibility.

Wait is this all of a sudden a prerequisite for something being believable?!?!?! What the hell did I live through since 2016?