70 points | by rntn8 hours ago
Is there any public data on how much money they have made, doing so?
That's the risk with relying on short sellers' reports. Very frequently, the short seller is lying.
With SuperMicro, the auditor's withdrawal is worth 100x the short sellers' report. This is because it is very common for short sellers to make up claims about a company's financials, but it is very rare for an auditor to voluntarily withdraw.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/07/13/is-super-micro-com...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor-hub/article/is-super-m...
https://investorplace.com/2024/03/smci-stock-alert-does-this...
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-30/florid... or https://archive.is/SGhLe
In a similar vein, Bloomberg was the source that Continental and United passenger jets were humping mid-air: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/13xq64x/thi....
...
You're talking about this cover, right? https://westoahu.hawaii.edu/cyber/vulnerability-research/did...
I think you're making the mistake of confusing a cover image for a claim. If you have any experience with magazine cover images, you shouldn't take them that literally, because they're not meant to be.
Verifiable fact: SuperMicro BMC firmwares (really all BMC firmwares from all manufacturers) have and will continue to have exploits: https://www.supermicro.com/en/support/security_BMC_virtual_m...
Verifiable fact: SuperMicro BMCs' default behavior is to expose itself on the LAN0 port if the dedicated BMC interface has no link: https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/other/IPMI_Users_Guide.pd...
It's really weird to me how desperate so many people are to shut down any mention of this story instead of adopting a “if it were true, what would it look like?”-and-hope-to-be-wrong approach.
You could always tell when investors or potential customers were in town because the SMCI parking lot would suddenly have brightly colored sports cars parked right out front of the office, only to vanish shortly after until the next high profile meeting.
I always thought this was strange, but chalked it up to it being a cultural difference on how business is done in Asia vs the USA, but apparently not. GoPro used to do the same thing at their office in San Mateo back when the stock wasn't circling the drain, two Ferrari's parked right outside the front door as you walked into the building. Appearances can often be deceiving I guess.
For instance, they appear to care about security issues that publicly embarrass them or that affect huge customers of theirs, issues that'd've been trivial to fix, instead of fixing issues for the sake of fixing them. This kind of "sales" based security and their responses have forced me to encourage multiple companies to use other vendors.
I know what you mean, but that is the first time I've encountered that contraction in print or even in conversation.