On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story, saying that all these big companies were hacked, why didn't anybody sue them? It was a major accusation! It just kinda...disappeared.
This might be the answer to you second question. No one seems to have taken the Bloomberg story to be true. Just went "that's dumb" and dropped it. In fact the only times I've ever seen it resurface is in a context to point out something negative about Bloomberg (like now), not the companies named in the article.
Sort of like the Elon Musk defamation case that just ended. Plaintiff didn't get anything because people didn't turn on him due to the accusation, they turned on Elon.
If it's not believed then you couldn't have suffered harm.
I believe it. Maybe not for that exact story with the lack of proof, but considering how such an attack is within the realm of possibility it seems foolish to not assume the handful of the most powerful and well-funded groups on Earth are doing such a thing. I’m not going to leave my door unlocked at night, for example, until my neighbor gets robbed and proves to me that is possible.
So you don't believe it, you believe another story. Bloomberg didn't say "this is possible" they said "this is happening and here are the exact details".
I believe it is happening, yes. The obvious plausibility and the way I’ve seen other state-sponsored things (any state) hushed up means the only reasonable thing for me to do is assume the story is based on truth even if the picture isn’t 100% complete. To put it another way, I believe the Bloomberg story is the “Room 641A” to a Snowden-level expose we may never get.
As I see it you don't actually believe that particular story, you believe something "like that" is plausible. So in other words Bloomberg wrote some plausible fiction. Nobody is saying something like that isn't possible, just that if we wanted to read fiction Bloomberg wouldn't be the place to look for it.
Given the string of high profile misreporting and failures to substantiate their claims one would have to be very gullible to still take Bloomberg reporting at face value without being presented with some hard proof and 3rd party confirmation.
What exactly would they sue them for? Defamation and libel claims don't just require the defendant to be wrong, they have to have known or ought to have known that the claims were false. If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.
>If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.
I guess that would be up to the courts to decide, wouldn't it? Considering they said Apple and AWS were compromised, that's a lot of firepower.
I'm skeptical that "some anonymous source told us, and we choose to believe it" would pass legal muster, especially when you are publishing something as a major media source. But anything is possible.
> On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't.
If the story were true, under what circumstances could Bloomberg reports have come into possession of a compromised sever to satisfy this requirement?
> On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story
Journalists evaluate and report what they're told by sources. For instance: they don't do scientific experiments themselves, but rather interview scientists about their results and report their statements. Their quality control is to get multiple sources to corroborate each other.
Saying Bloomberg journalists "fabricated" the story is going too far. If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest.
It's kind of not the case here. First, they're not required to take any claims at face value, they can (and would be expected to) verify if they're actually true by looking at the evidence their sources provide - and if there's no evidence, then they'd be expected to note that it's all speculation.
Second, at least some of the claimed sources were not anonymous and were interviewed later by others (there were a few HN threads back them some weeks after the initial story) and they explicitly disclaimed that they have confirmed the case, but rather that all they have told Bloomberg is essentially "something like this might be theoretically possible, sure, but the current evidence doesn't suggest that this has happened" - so we have some evidence that these Bloomberg journalists "attempted" to corroborate multiple sources which did not confirm the story that they wanted to tell, but they went ahead with the story anyway.
Buy it from a data center sale? We nuked our drives and sold the rest to a liquidation company when we moved to GCP. It's trivial to pick these up.
It's Bloomberg, my dudes. That news source is the lowest quality trusted news source. I like that they can stay in business though. Made a neat 30+% on SMCI easy peasy. And that requires people like you to trust Bloomberg so that's good.
On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story, saying that all these big companies were hacked, why didn't anybody sue them? It was a major accusation! It just kinda...disappeared.