[jstrong]

it's not the "only" sourcing of the main claim, merely an example. (did you read the article?)

> Alarmed by the devices’ sophistication, officials opted to warn a small number of potential targets in briefings that identified Supermicro by name. Executives from 10 companies and one large municipal utility told Bloomberg News that they’d received such warnings. While most executives asked not to be named to discuss sensitive cybersecurity matters, some agreed to go on the record.

> “This was espionage on the board itself,” said Mukul Kumar, who said he received one such warning during an unclassified briefing in 2015 when he was the chief security officer for Altera Corp., a chip designer in San Jose. “There was a chip on the board that was not supposed to be there that was calling home—not to Supermicro but to China.”

[musicale]

> There was a chip on the board that was not supposed to be there that was calling home—not to Supermicro but to China

An extra chip on the board sounds like pretty solid physical evidence.

What other information do we have about this chip and what it was doing?