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Supermicro reports that an external security audit found no evidence of Chinese espionage chips in the manufacturer’s server motherboards.

The audit was carried out following an explosive story by Bloomberg, which stated that the Chinese government had infiltrated Supermicro’s supply chain to install secret espionage chips on its motherboards. Those motherboards would have ended up in the servers of Apple and Amazon Web Services, among others.

The Bloomberg story received a lot of criticism from all sides. Several experts questioned its technical credibility, and Apple, AWS and Supermicro denied the accusations in the strongest possible terms.

We are convinced that a recent article claiming that a malicious hardware chip was implanted during the production process of our motherboards is wrong, Supermicro then wrote in a letter to customers. However, the company also promised to have an external security audit carried out to eliminate any doubt.

No evidence found

This audit by an unspecified external company has now been completed and, according to Supermicro, has not found any evidence of Chinese espionage chips.

A representative sample of our motherboards was tested, including the specific type of motherboard depicted in the article and motherboards purchased by companies referred to in the article, as well as newly manufactured motherboards, Supermicro writes in a new letter to customers.

After thorough investigation and a series of functional tests, the research firm found absolutely no evidence of harmful hardware on our motherboards, the hardware manufacturer emphasizes.

Supermicro would like to thank its customers, in particular Apple and AWS, for their support in this matter, as well as representatives of the US intelligence services, who rightly questioned the truth of the reports from the outset.

As we have said repeatedly since these allegations were reported, no government agency has ever told us that it has found malicious hardware in our products; no customer has ever told us that it has found malicious hardware on our products; and we have never seen any evidence of malicious hardware on our products, Supermicro concludes in the letter.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.