The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

[BumRushDaShow]

7. I used to build caseless machines to run various linux distros as a hobby

and one of them was a dual-CPU Supermicro motherboard (I think I put 2, PIII 600MHz CPUs in it and overclocked them). That was back in the early - mid 2000s so not sure what the timeframe was for this story and when they really found what they found. Apparently the subcontracted company Elemental built machines using SM server mobos for server farms (now called "clouds"...lol).

I have read numerous stories over the years about code included on certain microchips coming from China - and notably when there was a lot of speculation about what was going on in San Francisco where the big trans-Pacific fiber comm lines were coming and the NSA and whatnot... But based on these recent stories, they may have limited that to certain motherboard configurations that are known to be used for servers.