The operation saw a branch of China's armed forces, known as the People's Liberation Army, forcing Chinese manufacturers to insert chips the size of a grain of rice into US-designed servers during the equipment manufacturing process, the report claims.

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

Apple is using new proprietary software diagnostic tools that make it harder to conduct third-party repairs on iMac Pro and 2018 MacBook Pro.

This software ensures that if a device undergoes key part repairs from an unauthorized service provider, it will result in an “inoperative system and an incomplete repair.”

In a bombshell report earlier this week, Bloomberg revealed that tiny spy chips were planted on Apple and Amazon’s servers by Chinese spies. And yesterday, we saw official responses from the company strongly denying the occurrence of such an incident. The servers in question were made by Supermicro.

Now the latest report tells us that some of those servers were also infiltrated with malware. Both Apple and Facebook have confirmed this fact. However, let me clarify that this malware attack doesn’t mention any involvement of an alleged spy chip.

Facebook says that it found the compromised servers in 2015 and the malware was present on “a limited number of Supermicro hardware” that was used only “for testing purposes confined to our labs.”

Even as Amazon, Apple, and U.S. officials were investigating malicious microchips embedded in Supermicro server motherboards, Supermicro was the target of at least two other possible forms of attack, people familiar with multiple corporate probes say.

The first of the other two prongs involved a Supermicro online portal that customers used to get critical software updates, and that was breached by China-based attackers in 2015. The problem, which was never made public, was identified after at least two Supermicro customers downloaded firmware—software installed in hardware components—meant to update their motherboards’ network cards, key components that control communications between servers running in a data center. The code had been altered, allowing the attackers to secretly take over a server’s communications, according to samples passed around at the time among a small group of Supermicro customers. One of these customers was Facebook Inc.