Tim Cook calls on Bloomberg to return to the story of the alleged Supermicro – BGR hacking

Earlier this month, Bloomberg issued an explosive report claiming that agents of a Chinese intelligence organization had successfully installed malicious material on Supermicro servers that were eventually used by companies like Apple and Amazon. Very soon, many questions about the veracity of the initial report were raised. Not only Bloomberg oddly uneven report on the actual operation of the attack, one of the main sources of the story claims that history Bloomberg eventually ran with no sense.

In addition, Amazon and Apple have both published very firm responses, unequivocally denying all aspects of the story. And while some public relations statements tend to be vague and leave things open to interpretation, the denials of Apple and Amazon were very specific and left no problem.

Apple's denial reads in part: "In this regard, we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips," hardware manipulations "or vulnerabilities intentionally created on a server. Apple has never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any FBI investigations, nor are our contacts in law enforcement. "

A few weeks later, Tim Cook is now calling on Bloomberg retract completely. During an interview with BuzzFeed News, Cook emphasized again that the Bloomberg The story is not only misleading, but totally inaccurate.

"There is no truth in their story about Apple," Cook said. "They need to do the right thing and retract."

Bloombergin the meantime, does not seem to want to do such a thing. If anything, the company has doubled on the report. Commenting on this, a spokesman for Bloomberg told BuzzFeed:

The Bloomberg Businessweek survey is the result of more than a year of reports during which we conducted more than 100 interviews. Seventeen individual sources, including government officials and corporate insiders, confirmed the handling of computer hardware and other elements of the attacks. We also published the full statements of three companies, as well as a statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry. We are faithful to our history and trust our reports and our sources.

For what it's worth, the fact that Bloomberg working on the story for over a year and conducting more than 100 interviews is by no means convincing, especially if the story from the beginning – as Apple claims – was based on false information.

With both sides racking their heels, we have a scenario in which both parties can not possibly be right. Either Apple ment – which seems totally implausible at this stage – or Bloomberg spent a lot of resources tracking down a ghost of a story.