There’s a new wrinkle in the Bloomberg’s ongoing but controversial series on alleged hardware hacks affecting U.S. tech giants — despite heavy skepticism after the named companies rebuffed the allegations and critics poked holes in the reporting.

Bloomberg’s new report out Tuesday said that a U.S. telecom discovered that hardware it used in its data centers was “manipulated” by an implant designed to conduct covert surveillance and exfiltrate corporate or government secrets.

The implant was found on an Ethernet connector — used to hard-wire device to a network — on a motherboard developed by Supermicro, a major computer manufacturer that was named in the first Bloomberg story.

It was that first report that claimed China had infiltrated a Supermicro factory to install chips on motherboards that went on to go into servers in data centers operated by Apple and Amazon. Apple, Amazon and Supermicro denied the claims in a series of strong rebuttals. Supermicro’s said on Tuesday that it “still [has] no knowledge of any unauthorized components” and said it hadn’t been informed by any customer of the alleged security breach.

Although the report claims “fresh evidence of tampering” by China, it does not explicitly link the tampering to similar attacks on Apple and Amazon, or others.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/a-new-twist-in-bloombergs-spy-chip-report-implicates-u-s-telecom/