When the state department tells you to write a story you write the story, or face the real prospect of the end of access which will be the end your journalism career. Not an ideal system for anyone, except the state department.
As I've now said multiple times and I've not seen anyone argue against very strongly at all, there is no reason to believe this was a government-pushed story, because there are plenty of equally bad or worse things that are known to be true that could easily have been used instead. There are abundant examples of corporate and governmental espionage of this sort, in all directions. Indeed, when the article was first posted, many HN posters were skeptical precisely because they could name two or three much better ways to do it, some provided examples, and some told stories of having found these better examples already in the field.
And because if it had been a government push, it would have been accompanied by a government PR push on other fronts. But I saw no evidence the government picked up this story in particular, or even hardly referenced it. Being now months later we can also observe the government has not lifted a finger to substantiate this storyline or pull Bloomberg's bacon out of the increasingly hot fire.
The theory that this was government-pushed falls down on the ground that even if the government or some aspect of it wanted to push this narrative, this is not even remotely their best choice on how to do it.
Something like that happening would be an even juicier story than the one they published. I totally buy that some people in the government lied to some credulous reporters to get a false story they wanted out there. But there are tons of reporters out there, some of them are easy to trick, and leaning on reporters is likely to trigger their Woodward and Bernstein fantasies and result in some huge blowback. I'm not going to say that I find the level of incompetence you're assigning impossible, just that I find it unlikely.
Your snark aside, Bloomberg made these claims, it's on them to back it up. Not the other way around. So far, not a single fact has surfaced that lends those claims any credence.
I personally have learned more about the supply chain for various big tech firms. I have learned that something like what the original story described is possible, in that USA-based firms have no reliable way to prevent such hacking. That doesn't mean I believe Bloomberg's version, but then again I rarely do. I'm just not in such a hurry to believe SuperMicro's version either... We don't have to act as if we know what really happened. I don't see why anyone would be so sure that GP's speculation above about the State Department is unfounded either.
The general case of hardware being backdoored is believable, but the problems come down to, not just the lack of any kind of corroborating evidence, but the nature of these specific claims themselves having some hard-to-believe holes in them.
Basic informational hygiene is that the claim is garbage until proven otherwise, "credibility" notwithstanding. There is not only not a single positive reason to believe this story, there is mounting evidence that it should not be believed.
Haha, "credibility". A thing which does not exist.
Seriously, though, it seems that your idea of "basic informational hygiene" conflicts with a basic security posture in this case. We don't have to assume Super Micro has never been hacked, so I don't know why we would assume that. More in keeping with the topic of this thread, we don't have to assume the State Department (or whoever) has never caused a story to be published or discredited, so I don't know why we would assume that.
We're on the internet, a medium in which information can be trivially exchanged. Easily-defeated heuristics like "authority" and "credibility" are meaningless, if not harmful, when individual claims can (and should!) be evaluated on their own merits.
Basic security posture, sure, but nobody's arguing that we should change that and pretend that Supermicro is completely safe. Nothing is ever completely safe.
..but we're talking about a very specific claim which already has a number of gaping holes blown into it.
These reporters cover tech and ostensibly do not need access to the State Department. Nevermind the fact that the reporters who do cover the State Dept still enjoy access despite continuing to publish unflattering stories about the govt.
