A detailed technical rebuttal of Bloomberg's "backdoored servers" article

Earlier this month, Bloomberg published a terrifying, detailed story claiming that Chinese spies had, for years, been sneaking hardware backdoors into servers used in data-centers run by companies like Apple and Amazon, as well as Congress, the Senate, the White House, Navy battleships and more.

The story drew rare, detailed denials from the companies involved and prompted lots of skeptical rebuttals. Bloomberg, meanwhile, stood by its story.

Now, Patrick Kennedy has written the most detailed technical rebuttal to the story to date, pointing out plausible reasons why the Bloomberg story couldn't be true.

For me the greatest mystery here is how Bloomberg could be so sure of its facts and how the companies it has accused of being hacked could be so thorough and public in their denials. Bloomberg says it's spoken to sources in the companies involved with direct knowledge, implying that either Bloomberg has been very sloppy in its work, or that there's a huge, elaborate conspiracy among current and former employees in several companies and branches of the US government to hoax Bloomberg -- or that all these companies and agencies have all conspired in their denials, despite the eventual crisis of trust that will break out when the truth is finally known.

Baseboard management controllers or BMCs are active on crashed or turned off servers. They allow one to, for example, power cycle servers remotely. If you read our piece Explaining the Baseboard Management Controller or BMC in Servers BMCs are superchips. They replace a physical administrator working on a server in a data center for most tasks other than physical service (e.g.