Two Years After ‘The Big Hack’ ⇥ pxlnv.com

It has now been two years since Bloomberg published that wild story claiming that Chinese intelligence had infiltrated the supply chain of a company that sells servers to Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Department of Defense, and Bloomberg L.P.

I asked a Bloomberg spokesperson if they had any additional comment now that the story has been a permanent exclusive ever since. I have not heard back. Most of the story sits exactly as it did last year, except Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson have published a few more security-related articles.

This is just one story and, in case you hadn’t noticed, 2020 has been a very busy year. But it is also the year that security risks of Chinese government involvement in the tech landscape became an enormous story. The U.S. government attempted to severely curtail WeChat and TikTok. though both orders were blocked by judges and the cases are ongoing. These are the kind of stories that Bloomberg ought to be able to report on credibly: a security threat and the prospect of restricting specific companies from operating in the United States because of their connections to an authoritarian government.

But Bloomberg cannot be trusted on matters like these because it still hasn’t answered the most basic questions about its Supermicro server story. It has not published any additional reporting to clarify its story nor has it retracted the original report. It hangs in limbo — and limbo is not a great state for a high-profile national security story from a top-tier U.S. business publication.