New Evidence of Hacked Supermicro Hardware Found in U.S. Telecom

Seeing as they screwed up a bunch of the details yet again[1], I'm still skeptical.

1. https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/10496904808065843...

>So does it really matter if it's true or not?

Is this Bloomberg's new slogan?

I think they do both.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

Isn't the idea that the boards weren't tampered with but manufactured by contractors including extras?

My take on this is that it's been fairly obvious for a long time that these kinds of attacks are possible (if not easy) with today's technology. One could design a microcontroller, for example, that was disguised as an 0805 capacitor and functioned like an 0805 capacitor, but also had other functionality.

So why is this suddenly breaking news? It bears resemblance to most of the propaganda stories we have seen in recent years:

- it is based on truth. Supply chain attacks are known to exist

- the US government has a goal of escalating with China over trade and IP practices.

- national security threats justify nearly any form of government action in today's world.

- the story turns out to have been leaked through foreign sources. This is typically the pattern we see because of concerns about propaganda coming directly from US government officials to US news outlets. There is typically a middle layer that is outside of the US where the allegations can originate from until they are broadly accepted as fact.

So Apple and Google are not really lying. Chances are there has not been any sort of major security breach in either of those companies due to supply chain attacks. It is possible that they have been barred from revealing information about it for national security reasons (in this case propaganda reasons).

So I think we can expect the following next steps:

- The story will continue to hover in this slow reveal format until enough laypeople come to understand the key concepts -- circuit assembly, components, trojan horse components, QC processes, subcontractors, etc. Once the stage has been set there will be more revelations and leaks from major companies that corroborate the story.

The goal is to make China the crisis in the buildup to the 2020 election. It's not a coincidence that this strategy is getting underway right after the midterm elections in the US.

Our president has already been attacking China with rhetoric and trade sanctions, and this story is meant to turn public opinion broadly against China.

The supply chain attacks do not have to have been significant (or successful) to make this happen. The very idea that "sneaky" Chinese intelligence agencies and firms would be able to slip this by US firms' quality control measures is enough to inflict paranoia on Americans and help them start to view China as a terrifying adversary that must be stopped.

China's military outnumbers the US military by 20:1 in terms of the number of active duty fighters, and China's economy is approaching first world standards in major cities far faster than the US had ever expected. China dominates scientific publications in the hard sciences, and its top universities are 10x more competitive (or more) than top US universities.

So hawks in the US realize that this may be the last opportunity for some sort of power projection or military driven containment of China's ambitions.

This is foolhardy, because China is led by a group of highly rational people whose policy responses to the administration's trade threats have been masterful and precise, and have conveyed with no uncertainty that China will not be bullied.

So what we're seeing is a short time horizon strategy by the US which is meant to have electoral consequences in 2020 and pave the way for some degree of hostile escalation with China. US weapons systems are still significantly more advanced, but China has likely weaponized many aspects of US infrastructure via these sorts of supply chain attacks. My guess is that the US Government is not aware of many of these, and will panic when they are discovered.

Fortunately for us all, China's leadership is calm and not prone to knee-jerk responses. China is rising to world prominence faster than expected, and the US will not take that lying down. However it is probably too late at this point, as China has a tremendous amount of soft power stemming from its importance to the US supply chain. Because of this there is still much hope for a peaceful, trade-driven equilibrium to emerge.