Tim Cook Asks Bloomberg To Retract The Spy Chip Story

Earlier this month, Bloomberg shockingly reported that malicious hardware was planted on Supermicro systems by an intelligence organization of China, the systems are used by Amazon and Apple. There were questions about the report’s veracity. Bloomberg’s report had a lot of spots showing its respect to how the attackers worked; moreover, one of the key sources of the story declares that Bloomberg’s story made no sense.

In addition, Apple and Amazon had their strong responses which firmly denied every aspect of the story. Although several PR announcements seem unclear and leave the rest to interpretation, the two giants – Apple and Amazon – made their denials specific and all clear.

In its denial, Apple stated that they were very clear about the issue, they has never discovered any malicious chips, vulnerabilities or hardware manipulations planted in any server. There was never any connection between Apple and FBI or other agencies about any incident similar to this. They have no idea of any FBI’s investigation, as well as their contacts are not in law enforcement.

Several weeks later, Tim Cook is now asking Bloomberg to retract its story. Being interviewed by BuzzFeed News, once again he emphasized that Bloomberg’s story is totally inaccurate.

Cook said, there was no truth in the story and that Bloomberg had to fix this and retract its story.

Nevertheless, Bloomberg seems to have no intention to do that. In fact, it has continued the story by saying the investigation results from a year-long report, in which more than 100 interviews were conducted. Government officials and companies’ insiders are among seventeen individual sources to confirm the manipulated hardware and the attack on other elements. Plus, we revealed full statements from three companies, and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ statement. To conclude, they claimed their confidence in the story, reports and sources.

Apple continued, Bloomberg’s work on the story during over a year and 100 interviews conducted is not convincing at all, especially if the story started based on misinformation.

Both sides are standing their grounds, there may be a scenario in which both are not right. Either Apple is telling lies, which seems unlikely, or Bloomberg is making up the story.