How do you know Bloomberg's sources don't? They're anonymous, and while they might know about the implants in detail, they may not have the authority to take examples on a public dog and pony show.

Also, if they want to keep their anonymity, they probably have to be careful about what gets released in order avoid exposing themselves. For example, if you have a limited-distribution report you want to leak info from, leaking a summary of the report is a lot safer than leaking the report text itself. At a minimum, the latter narrows down the leaker to someone who had physical access to a copy.

Certainly I might not believe "briandear" writing an article with only confidential sources (and really, that should be the term, not anonymous), but you don't make your living by being a reliable source of news.

Not to mention, if this hardware had been trying to phone home, it's safe to assume it would have set off some kind of an alert at at least one of these places.

"...let us consider a hypothetical. What if: 1. Everything in the Businessweek story is true, Chinese spies planted hardware backdoors in computers built and used by major American companies, and the FBI investigated along with those companies and discovered the backdoors. 2. It is a national-security secret and the companies were instructed by the FBI never to acknowledge it. 3. The companies are patriotically but falsely denying the hack."

But no, they went thermonuclear on the denial.

“In 2016, Apple informed Supermicro that it was severing their relationship entirely—a decision a spokesman for Apple ascribed in response to Businessweek’s questions to an unrelated and relatively minor security incident.”

Maybe at some big companies, but not anywhere I've worked. I hardly know anyone who audits outgoing traffic with dedicated hardware.

I wonder if there is some magical market cap boundary beyond which companies stop being grossly negligent. We know it's over 200B as Intel somehow never bothered fixing their products for decades, let's hope five times that is big enough.

It would most certainly be illegal.

Bloomberg probably ran this hoping that now that people are looking, some folks outside the circle of anonymous sources will find the chip so that they don't risk exposing their sources.

The story is so explosive that I find it very difficult to believe that Bloomberg isn't on very solid ground.

Nevertheless, getting hold of irrefutable physical evidence may be very difficult. By breaking the story, they now have lots of people now looking for that evidence.

In addition, they may now have enough cover to be able to actually present evidence in their possession and claim that it came from an outside source in order to protect their sources.

There is no good reason for Bloomberg to lie about this as it will significantly damage their reputation and bottom line if proven false.

Now, that doesn't mean that Bloomberg wasn't the target of an operation and was given planted, false information to trace leaks. However, as this has been in the playbook very recently, I would expect the press to be on guard for this.

How many people at Apple or Amazon have the ability to steal compromised hardware and surreptitiously hand it to a journalist? That seems like a pretty lofty expectation.