Bloomberg claimed on Thursday there's a "big hack" on Amazon and Apple done by "Chinese spies" in 2014-2015, but the two companies officially responded "no."

Bloomberg's Businessweek said someone from Chinese military somehow ordered a subcontractor of Amazon, Apple and nearly 30 other companies to put an additional hack chip on the circuit of servers.

The media outlet says testers at those companies found the hack chip and reported to US government, which Amazon and Apple replied never happened.

After the companies published their denial, Businessweek updated the story, still insisting that they have six sources in the US government that confirms the case.

Although Businessweek said some of the sources are former officials, no name is mentioned for anyone to check.

"Untrue"

Both Amazon and Apple issued a statement saying Businessweek's report was incorrect.

"At no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified hardware or malicious chips ... Nor have we engaged in an investigation with the government," read an article on Amazon's official blog for its web service.

"Apple has never found malicious chips in our servers," Apple said in an online statement. "No one from Apple ever reached out to the FBI about anything like this, and we have never heard from the FBI about an investigation of this kind."

Both statements insisted that they have told Businessweek multiple times in the past few months that the hack claims are false.

The flawed process

Businessweek used pictures to describe how the hack works, in which it says the chip is "as small as a sharpened pencil tip."

Small in size, the media outlet said the chip has memory, network capability and processing power.

Ask anyone with a little bit of knowledge about computer hardware if that technology exists and prepare to get laughed at.

Computer chips cannot go too small in size. There's limitations in the nature of silicon, which is common knowledge to hardware designers.

If anyone had such great technology, why not take down Intel? That will obviously bring more benefit.

British media outlet The Register is also questioning the possibility of making such a chip. They asked in a tweet "what lithography is it using? Seven nanometers?".

The Register also mentioned that the Businessweek article is too vague for technicians to know the details of the attack. "The Bloomberg article is not particularly technical, so a lot of us are having to guesstimate how the hack worked."

Permanent?

The Businessweek report goes on saying the chips are installed with a type of server hardware commonly known as "blades."

The reporter, Jordan Robertson, said in a Bloomberg video that hardware hack is "a permanent infection."

How easy is it to deal with this "permanent" hack? Simply pull it off.

Modern servers are configured to be "redundant," which means there is more hardware than you need, so you can simply pull a part off while the machine is running and not break a thing.

The blades are designed with a different look compared to home desktops mainly for this reason. It's easier to pull them off and install a different one.

China's response

In its response, Ministry of  Foreign Affairs  of China (MOFA) said, How about we talk more about building a safe Internet instead of accusing others of hacking, especially when the accusation has come out of nowhere?

China has been trying hard to maintain the safety of the Internet: "Safety first" can be heard almost everywhere in China and hardware factories are no exception.

The  MOFA said that China has been trying to maintain supply chain safety at least since 2011, when the country of other Shanghai Cooperation Organization members proposed code of conduct on info-security to the United Nations (UN).