Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls on Bloomberg to Retract Report on Chinese Spy Chip: ‘No Truth in Their Story’
Two weeks ago, Bloomberg Businessweek released a stunning report on Chinese spies planting tiny chips on servers with the purpose of creating a “stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines.”
Their report revealed that this affected 30 U.S. companies, including Apple:
Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.
Apple gave Bloomberg a statement denying it, though the report says, “The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation.”
Well, now Apple CEO Tim Cook himself has gone on the record, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, not only denying the report again but saying Bloomberg should retract it.
He said, “There is no truth in their story about Apple. They need to do that right thing and retract it.
Cook told BuzzFeed he personally spoke to the Bloomberg reporters and claimed they “never provided Apple with any specific details about the malicious chips it is alleged to have found and removed”:
“We turned the company upside down,” Cook said. “Email searches, data center records, financial records, shipment records. We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep and each time we came back to the same conclusion: This did not happen. There’s no truth to this.”
Asked if scenario like the one Bloomberg described could occur without him knowing about it, Cook replied, “The likelihood of that is virtually zero.”
Bloomberg is standing by its reporting, saying in a statement, “Bloomberg Businessweek’s investigation is the result of more than a year of reporting, during which we conducted more than 100 interviews. Seventeen individual sources, including government officials and insiders at the companies, confirmed the manipulation of hardware and other elements of the attacks. We also published three companies’ full statements, as well as a statement from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources.”
[image via screengrab]
