Thursday, March 24

Report: Apple designing its own servers to avoid snooping

One of Facebook's data centers filled with custom-designed servers. (credit: Facebook)

Apple has begun designing its own servers partly because of suspicions that hardware is being intercepted before it gets delivered to Apple, according to a report yesterday from The Information.

"Apple has long suspected that servers it ordered from the traditional supply chain were intercepted during shipping, with additional chips and firmware added to them by unknown third parties in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration, according to a person familiar with the matter," the report said. "At one point, Apple even assigned people to take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there. Building its own servers with motherboards it designed would be the most surefire way for Apple to prevent unauthorized snooping via extra chips."

The Information's source noted that "you can’t go take an X-Ray of every computer that hits the floor. You want to make sure there’s no extracurricular activity."

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