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Tim Cook Demands Bloomberg Retract Chinese Spy Chip Story

Apple's CEO made the statement as the security community continues to cast doubt on a Bloomberg Businessweek piece that claims China secretly planted spy chips in US servers.

By Michael Kan
October 19, 2018
Tim Cook

Apple CEO Tim Cook is demanding that Bloomberg retract a story that says China secretly planted spy chips into the company's servers.

"There is no truth in their story about Apple," Cook told BuzzFeed in an interview. "They need to do that right thing and retract it."

Cook made the statement as the security community has been casting serious doubt on a Bloomberg Businessweek piece from Oct. 4 that claims China has been exploiting the country's manufacturing supply chain to secretly plant the spy chips. Servers sold to nearly 30 companies were tampered with, including those used by Apple and Amazon, according to Bloomberg's report, which cites 17 anonymous sources.

Bloomberg has faced strong pushback from the affected companies, including Amazon, and US government officials, who say they've found no evidence of the secret Chinese spy chip. Apple itself began investigating Bloomberg's claim in October 2017.

China Spy Security Chip

"We turned the company upside down," Cook tells BuzzFeed. "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."

Cook's comments appear to be the first time Apple has publicly called on a media organization to pull a news story. However, Bloomberg told PCMag the publication stands by its reporting.

"Bloomberg Businessweek's investigation is the result of more than a year of reporting, during which we conducted more than 100 interviews," Bloomberg said in an email. "Seventeen individual sources, including government officials and insiders at the companies, confirmed the manipulation of hardware and other elements of the attacks."

Security experts say the supply chain attack outlined in Bloomberg's report is certainly plausible. The Pentagon has also recognized that China's control of the world's manufacturing represents a potential national security threat.

Still, no IT security story has faced so many blanket denials from across the tech industry and the government. On Thursday, US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told CyberScoop he's seen no evidence of China planting spy chips into manufactured servers.

One senior official with the US National Security Agency also said he was "befuddled" by the claims in Bloomberg's story. "I have pretty great access, [and yet] I don't have a lead to pull from the government side," NSA advisor Rob Joyce reportedly said last week.

"I have grave concerns about where this has taken us," Joyce added. "I worry that we're chasing shadows right now."

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About Michael Kan

Senior Reporter

I've been with PCMag since October 2017, covering a wide range of topics, including consumer electronics, cybersecurity, social media, networking, and gaming. Prior to working at PCMag, I was a foreign correspondent in Beijing for over five years, covering the tech scene in Asia.

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