Amazon and Apple have both strongly denied reports that their data centre equipment may have come under surveillance by the Chinese authorities.
A report in Bloomberg BusinessWeek Thursday alleged the Chinese were able to gain access through a tiny microchip that had been inserted during the equipment manufacturing process.
The data centre servers became part of the Amazon portfolio through its 2015 acquisition of Elemental.
“As we shared with Bloomberg BusinessWeek multiple times over the last couple months, at no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified hardware or malicious chips in SuperMicro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon systems,” an Amazon spokesperson told Broadband TV News. “Additionally, we have not engaged in an investigation with the government.”
Apple said it had found no evidence of the microchips while SuperMicro denied it had inserted them.
In a blog post Steve Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer at AWS wrote the number of inaccuracies in the article were difficult to count “The first and most obvious reason is that we never found modified hardware or malicious chips in Elemental servers. Aside from that, we never found modified hardware or malicious chips in servers in any of our data centers. And, this notion that we sold off the hardware and datacenter in China to our partner Sinnet because we wanted to rid ourselves of SuperMicro servers is absurd,” he said.
