The Spy Chip That Never Was
How Bloomberg’s Unchecked Tech Journalism Sunk an Entire Company on Anecdotal Evidence
5 min readMay 9, 2020
Anecdotes are powerful teachers.
This was on Bloomberg Businessweek the first week of October 2018.
The article detailed how the Chinese were infiltrating the biggest companies through the use of a tiny chip placed in the fabrication process. One of the companies specifically targeted took a nosedive in the markets.
It didn’t go into detail about the theoretical hack. It didn’t name the sources. It never really discussed the methods about what was even stolen.
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It accused and accused.
Here is what happened to the main company implicated.
Supermicro lost half of its share value.
Here is Wikipedia’s succinct snippet:
On October 4, 2018…
