Tim Cook: Bloomberg should withdraw article about Supermicro-hack

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with Buzzfeed that Bloomberg should withdraw a recent article stating that the Chinese government has placed small chips on Supermicro motherboards that have been deposited with Apple.

Buzzfeed editors write that they had a telephone interview with Cook, in which he said about the Bloomberg article: “Their story about Apple is not true, they should make the right decision and withdraw it.” He added that from the beginning he was involved in communication about the article. “I personally spoke with our former lawyer Bruce Sewell to the Bloomberg editors, and we made it very clear that this did not happen and answered all their questions, and each time they came to us, the story was changed again and every time. we conducted a survey that yielded nothing. “

Cook says that during these surveys, e-mails were searched, as were financial data, data center records and delivery data. The Bloomberg editors would never have come up with hard evidence, but only ‘with vague second-hand stories’. The press agency tells Buzzfeed in a comment that the article is the result of more than a year’s work and more than a hundred interviews. Seventeen sources would have confirmed the information. “We stay behind our story and have faith in our reports and sources,” said a spokesman.

Bloomberg published the article two weeks ago . It stated that the Chinese government had placed espionage chips on Supermicro server motherboards, which then ended up in data centers of large companies such as Amazon and Apple. In this way, it would have been possible to create a backdoor that gave access to the networks of these servers. Apple and Amazon soon published extensive negations. Among others, the US and the UK did not doubt these denials.