"One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the worlds most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro . . . "  Bloomberg Businessweek

"Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China."



Both Amazon and Apple officially deny these claims. Amazon went ahead and acquired Supermicro in mid-2015. But Apple cancelled its order for 30,000 Elemental Systems rack mounted server grade computers and issued the contract for the servers to another, more expensive supplier, one who did not use the same motherboard maker. However the official line from each company is as they wrote: Its untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise, an issue with malicious chips, or hardware modifications when acquiring Elemental, Amazon wrote. On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, hardware manipulations or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server, Apple wrote. We remain unaware of any such investigation, wrote a spokesman for Supermicro, Perry Hayes. The source of all this is reporting from Bloomberg Businessweek citing anonymous sources in the companies and government, so it is possible it is Fake News. So far it is also single sourced and any other reports are all citing Bloomberg as their source.



It should be noted that although Q shows a photo of an Apple store, Apple designs its own logic boards with the boards being multi layered, making the addition of an additional chip a not inconsequential proposition, requiring a re-engineering of the entire board to accommodate the new addition. Apple is also fully in charge of their own quality control for their products, with a detailed computerized comparison done on every logic board to assure that it matches specifications when it comes out of manufacture. In addition, Apple designs each of the processors and many of the ICs on their mobile devices as Systems on a Chip (SoC) by hand, not computer designed, and it would be nearly impossible for any Chinese agency to add something to a chip (it would have to be done at the design stage). Any surreptitiously added IC would raise a red flag in the quality control checks done on every Apple product. Also, Apple does not use third-party reference design motherboards as do many PC manufacturers, who often buy parts such as motherboards and logic boards from multiple suppliers of which there are many such generic makers in China. Apple was purchasing these rack mount server grade computers for a specific use in their content data server farms. They were designed by Elemental Systems to handle massive streaming video, not for home or even office level use. They would not be found on a home computer grade mother board. It is highly unlikely they would be found in a home Microsoft PC or any mobile laptop either. It would not exist in any Android or iOS device either. . . although Chinese made Android devices have been discovered that regularly upload the data about their users to servers in China. As Q says, they were on top of this from three years ago. (See Amazon, Android, Apple, China, iOS, Microsoft).