Apple suspects government spies have infiltrated its supply chain

Services like iCloud and iTunes generate massive amounts of data, more than Apple’s data centers can handle on their own, and the company has to rely on the cloud services of Amazon and Microsoft to make up for its inadequacy. Relying on other companies, especially competitors, is something that Apple has always loathed, but the company has run into some problems while trying to improve its cloud infrastructure and become completely self-reliant. One such problem, as reported by The Information on Wednesday, is that Apple believes the servers it orders for its data centers are being intercepted by third-parties for the purpose of installing backdoors for government spies.

Apple’s huge success with services like iTunes, the App Store, and iCloud has a dark side. Apple hasn’t been able to build the all the data centers it needs to run these enormous photo storage and internet services on its own. And it worries that some of the equipment and cloud services it buys has been compromised by vendors who have agreed to put “back door” technology for government spying, according to a report from The Information’s Amir Efrati and Steve Nellis. Apple has also been using cloud services from its rivals, namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, to help it run these services. And it reportedly just signed a contract to use Google’s cloud services as well. Meanwhile, it has embarked on yet another attempt to build more of its own data centers to handle all of that, called Project McQueen, reports Jordan Novet at VentureBeat, and the project is having a rough go of it, reports The Information. Still, Apple is motivated to design build its own hardware, the same as Google and Amazon does, and run it on its own for one pretty scary reason: security. It suspects that the servers it has been ordering from others are being captured during shipping, and backdoors added to them that will make them susceptible to being hacked.