HMM: China’s Alleged Big Hack — ‘No There, There.’

At a Wednesday event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and RealClearPolitics, Joyce was asked twice about the sensational Oct. 4 story headlined “The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies.” The piece asserted that in 2015 spyware in the form of tiny microchips was surreptitiously placed – apparently by the Chinese military — on mother boards assembled in San Jose, Calif., for computer servers sold to American companies, including Amazon’s AWS and Apple Inc.

This purported effort to exploit the U.S. supply chain with manipulated hardware shocked national security officials as well as private sector cybersecurity officers already under siege from cyberattacks. Joyce, the senior adviser for cybersecurity strategy to the director of the NSA, downplayed the threat, however, saying that neither the agency nor any of the supposedly infiltrated companies have found any compromised mother boards.

Bloomberg or one of the allegedly hacked companies is going to have to produce one of these spy chips.