China seems willing to gamble its huge manufacturing industry in service to its spying. Why should foreign companies trust their manufacturing to China anymore? Regardless of the economic price China will pay for this, it can never be fully trusted again.
A new report is alleging the Chinese government directly interceded to insert small microchips into motherboards from a company called Supermicro, that are in use in servers everywhere from the adult film industry to U.S. military and U.S. Intelligence Community data centers, which make them vulnerable open them up to remote hacks. If the claims turn out to be true, it would be an intelligence operation of historic proportions that would have far-reaching and long-lasting ramifications.
On Oct. 4, 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published its story, which is the culmination of years of investigative work and cites nearly 20 anonymous sources from both the U.S. government and private companies reportedly involved in the affair. The piece says that American authorities first became aware of the existence of the chips in 2015, that the classified probe is still ongoing, and that U.S. officials have identified an unspecified unit of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as being responsible for sneaking the malicious hardware into the servers.