Super Micro Denies Malicious Chips Report, To Conduct Further Review Of Hardware

(RTTNews) - Super Micro Computer has said to its customers that it will conduct a review of its hardware for any proof of malicious chips as alleged by Bloomberg's recent report.

"Despite the lack of any proof that a malicious hardware chip exists, we are undertaking a complicated and time-consuming review to further address the article," the company said in a letter to its customers.

"We are confident that a recent article, alleging a malicious hardware chip was implanted during the manufacturing process of our motherboards, is wrong. From everything we know and have seen, no malicious hardware chip has been implanted during the manufacturing of our motherboards," the company confirms.

The company also said the design of its motherboards are extremely complex, which makes it "practically impossible to insert a functional, unauthorized component onto a motherboard without it being caught by any one, or all, of the checks in our manufacturing and assembly process."

"The complex design of the underlying layers of the board also makes it highly unlikely that an unauthorized hardware component, or an altered board, would function properly."

Last Friday, Apple Inc. (AAPL) Chief Executive Tim Cook had called for Bloomberg to retract a story alleging Chinese spy planted malicious chips on its servers.

In an interview with Buzzfeed News, "They need to do that right thing and retract it."

"We turned the company upside down," Cook told Buzzfeed. "Email searches, data centre records, financial records, shipment records. We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep and each time we came back to the same conclusion: This did not happen. There's no truth to this."

Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this month reported that Apple found "malicious chips" in its servers in 2015. According to the report, the data center hardware used by Apple and Amazon Web Services, which was supplied by server company Super Micro, was under surveillance by the Chinese government.

However, Apple had denied those claims. Apple said it never found malicious chips, "hardware manipulations" or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server.