Semiconductor & Technology Specialist, Ingenuity

William Keating

Dr. William Keating is a highly experienced senior executive with over 25 years experience in the IT/Semiconductor Industry. The majority of Dr. Keating's career was spent at Intel Corporation where he held senior leadership positions in Europe, the US and Asia from 1992 through 2014. He served as Intel's IT Director for APAC, China & Japan from 2005 through 2014 when he was based in Hong Kong and was responsible for the IT systems (Infrastructure, Networks, Data Centres, ERP, Sales & Marketing systems, Business Intelligence etc. ) for all of Intel's offices & factories through the region. From 1998 through 2005, he was the founder & director of an internal IT Consulting Organisation (IT Flex Services), a 500-person team which remains a core part of the Intel IT Organisation to this day. Dr. Keating's first 6 years at Intel were spent in charge of the Factory Automation Systems (Robotics, Databases, Networks, Servers, Clients etc.) supporting Intel's then state-of-the-art 200mm factory network. Since leaving Intel in 2014, Dr Keating established his own Technology Research & Consulting Company (www.ingenuity.hk) where he focuses on the products, roadmaps & technologies of companies such as Intel, AMD, Samsung, Apple, Micron- as well as the key equipment suppliers to those companies e.g. ASML, AMAT, Canon, Nikon etc. Dr. Keating specializes in niche topics of high significance within the semiconductor industry. These include the future of Moore's Law and in particular the significance of Lithography in maintaining Moore's Law (EUV, SDA, NanoImprint), the role & growth of the GPU in specialised applications such as Deep Learning (Neural Networks) for Voice, Image & Pattern recognition at companies such as Facebook, Google & Baidu. He also holds regular discussions on the future of memory, in particular the rise of 3D NAND and the emergence of new memory technologies such as 3D Xpoint.

Semiconductor & Technology Specialist

No Yuan Manipulator/Growth /Consumption/End of WTO/Defying the Trade War

SuperMicro China Hack. Bloomberg's Got It Wrong!

Ingenuity

Our focus is exclusively on in-depth research & consulting in the broader semiconductor industry. We focus on the key players, namely Intel, Micron, Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, NVIDIA, AMD, TSMC & Global Foundries - as well as some of the lesser known, but nonetheless critical, companies such as ASML (for EUV), Mellanox, Cavium, Xilinx etc. We specialise in their products, roadmaps, process technologies, competitive advantages & threats etc. We also help our clients understand the implications of new and emerging technologies, e.g. 3D X-Point, 3D NAND, Carbon Nanotubes, Autonomous Driving, Graphene, Silicon Photonics, Wafer-Level Optics, Artificial Intelligence, FPGA, GPU, ASIC etc. 

Semiconductor Analysis & Research

Thematic (Sector/Industry)

Colombia Semiconductors and semiconductor equipment / Thematic (Sector/Industry)

Bloomberg dropped a bombshell two weeks ago with its report alleging Chinese hacking of Supermicro motherboards and the compromising of some thirty US companies, most prominently <a href="https://www.smartkarma.com/entities/666" target="_blank" data-smartkarma-citation="entities:666:1">Apple</a> and <a href="https://www.smartkarma.com/entities/409" target="_blank" data-smartkarma-citation="entities:409:1">Amazon</a>.  We subsequently shared our doubts about this story here <a href="https://www.smartkarma.com/insights/supermicro-china-hack-bloomberg-s-got-it-wrong" target="_blank" data-smartkarma-citation="insights:24761">SuperMicro China Hack. Bloomberg's Got It Wrong!</a> In the intervening period, Bloomberg has published yet another <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evidence-of-hacked-supermicro-hardware-found-in-u-s-telecom" target="_blank">report</a> along the same lines, this time claiming that a major US telecommunications company was hacked, again using a Supermicro server motherboard assembled in China. In this instance, the report is based on evidence obtained from ex-Israeli military, now CEO of security consulting firm Sepio Systems, Yossi Appleboum. Bizarrely, the report implies that the implant used in this case is similar to a device revealed in the infamous ANT catalog, a list of super high-tech spying gadgets made for the US National Security Agency (NSA) by their Advanced Network (ANT) division and which was leaked to the public back in 2013. Even more bizarrely, the report states that once the implant was identified and the server removed, Sepio's team was not able to perform further analysis on the chip, without providing the slightest explanation as to why this might be the case. Furthermore, this latest Bloomberg report fails to mention the very pertinent fact that telecoms company T-Mobile did have security breach in the US around the same time that this implant was discovered, with millions of customers personal data compromised and surely relevant to their reporting.   Meanwhile, one of the security consultants named in the first Bloomberg report has broken his silence and participated in a podcast where he is adamant that Bloomberg misrepresented the conversations he had with them over the course of the last year. Computer systems get hacked, data gets stolen, we get it. There are highly advanced spying devices out there, the ANT catalog proves it. Security companies sometimes find suspicious devices in their client's data centers, that's their job afterall. We take Sepio Systems at their word that they found a suspicious device on a Supermicro server in a client's data center but are at a loss to understand why they would unilaterally decide not to examine it in minute detail and share those findings with the widest possible audience as quickly as possible.Finally, when this latest Bloomberg report appears to suggest that the spy chip closely resembles what we know the NSA had, and presumably still has, in its spy tools catalog, why should we jump to the conclusion that Chinese agents were the ones using it? If Bloomberg's right about compromised servers, they may be very wrong about who compromised them in the first place. <a href="https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/" target="_blank"></a>

Bloomberg dropped a bombshell two weeks ago with its report alleging Chinese hacking of Supermicro motherboards and the compromising of some thirty US companies, most prominently Apple and Amazon.  We subsequently shared our doubts about this story here SuperMicro China Hack. Bloomberg's Got It Wrong! In the intervening period, Bloomberg has published yet another report along the same lines, this time claiming that a major US telecommunications company was hacked, again using a Supermicro server motherboard assembled in China. In this instance, the report is based on evidence obtained from ex-Israeli military, now CEO of security consulting firm Sepio Systems, Yossi Appleboum. Bizarrely, the report implies that the implant used in this case is similar to a device revealed in the infamous ANT catalog, a list of super high-tech spying gadgets made for the US National Security Agency (NSA) by their Advanced Network (ANT) division and which was leaked to the public back in 2013. Even more bizarrely, the report states that once the implant was identified and the server removed, Sepio's team was not able to perform further analysis on the chip, without providing the slightest explanation as to why this might be the case. Furthermore, this latest Bloomberg report fails to mention the very pertinent fact that telecoms company T-Mobile did have security breach in the US around the same time that this implant was discovered, with millions of customers personal data compromised and surely relevant to their reporting.   Meanwhile, one of the security consultants named in the first Bloomberg report has broken his silence and participated in a podcast where he is adamant that Bloomberg misrepresented the conversations he had with them over the course of the last year. Computer systems get hacked, data gets stolen, we get it. There are highly advanced spying devices out there, the ANT catalog proves it. Security companies sometimes find suspicious devices in their client's data centers, that's their job afterall. We take Sepio Systems at their word that they found a suspicious device on a Supermicro server in a client's data center but are at a loss to understand why they would unilaterally decide not to examine it in minute detail and share those findings with the widest possible audience as quickly as possible.Finally, when this latest Bloomberg report appears to suggest that the spy chip closely resembles what we know the NSA had, and presumably still has, in its spy tools catalog, why should we jump to the conclusion that Chinese agents were the ones using it? If Bloomberg's right about compromised servers, they may be very wrong about who compromised them in the first place. 

Bloomberg's Supermicro China Hack Security Reports Grow More Bizarre By The Day