The Big Hack - An Investigative Report

Everyone from Amazon to Apple to the U.S. military used this piece of equipment from a company in California.

- Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service,

known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinise Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Josebased company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server mother boards, the fibreglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centres large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staffboxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.