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Apple CEO Tim Cook said Bloomberg Businessweek should pull out a survey article released Oct. 4 that claimed that servers purchased by Apple, Amazon and more than two dozen other unidentified companies contained spy circuits installed by China.
In an interview with Buzzfeed News, Cook said, "There is no truth in their story about Apple. Cook, who said he had been involved in talks with Bloomberg reporters since the beginning, said the news agency had never provided Apple with specific details, and believed the information was based on "accounts". waves. Apple had previously denied being contacted or had been contacted by the FBI or other government agencies, the article said.
Apple did not immediately respond to FortuneRequest for comment.
Buzzfeed noted that Apple had never publicly requested the retraction of an item, even when the company denied its accuracy. A search in the newspaper archives seems to confirm this. The radio program This American life chose to remove an episode of 2012 on Apple's main Chinese manufacturer, Foxconn, after discovering that its main contributor had invented details and changed the facts.
The Bloomberg survey revealed that the Chinese government had infiltrated the supply chain of Super Micro, a major manufacturer of motherboards used in servers. Motherboards contain the main processor, memory and other circuits that allow a computer to function.
Through secret design changes in the factory, the Chinese army was able to insert a small custom chip designed into the motherboards of the video compression server manufacturer Elemental, which relied on Super Micro for the manufacture. These circuits could reverse the operating system and communicate over the Internet to control the servers operated by China in order to siphon information of any kind, including sensitive data (such as private encryption keys) transmitted within the network. A server and launch attacks from a privileged position within the company. and the government networks on which the Elemental servers were installed.
The blockbuster account swept through information security experts as well as journalists who covered the field in an exhaustive manner, as no one has yet been able to confirm the story. Bloomberg's article relied on 17 anonymous sources from the US government and was associated with Apple and other companies.
Although none of the parties involved asserted that Bloomberg had fabricated any information, Cook 's call to retract most closely approximates an allegation that the media does not make any claims. did not check the accounts provided by his sources.
An expert quoted in the story, Joe Fitzpatrick, spoke to Bloomberg during the reporting process of the general form of an attack as described in the article. Later, in a podcast, he told Bloomberg that the scenario described by Bloomberg "did not make sense". He also stated that Bloomberg's narrative corresponded so closely to his hypothetical scenario that it seemed "that they had been removed from the conversations I had had about theoretically, how do the hardware implants work? . "
Bloomberg remains true to its statements, according to a statement provided to Fortune by a spokesman for the company. "Bloomberg Businessweek's The 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. "
A number of companies, government agencies, independent security analysts, and government officials have issued detailed rebuttals or made explicit statements rejecting much of the story's story about the discovery of malicious material.
On Oct. 4, Apple issued a statement entitled "What Businessweek did wrong about Apple" and sent Oct. 8 a letter to Congress rejecting both general and specific claims. Amazon acquired Elemental in 2015. She denied the details of the story regarding this company and its use of Elemental servers.
Super Micro told Reuters that she had never sold servers with malicious chips, never found any hardware made by her, had never been disclosed to a customer, and that she had never sold them. no government agency had ever contacted the company.
The Department of Homeland Security also issued a statement on October 6: "We have no reason to doubt the statements of the companies cited in history." The UK's national cybersecurity agency has also backed statements by Apple and Amazon.
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