Apple CEO Tim Cook tells Bloomberg to retract China server compromise story

No evidence found to back-up Bloomberg's claims, says Cook

Apple CEO Tim Cook has demanded that Bloomberg retract a story published just over two weeks ago that suggested that servers used by Apple - and a number of other big-name companies - had been compromised by Chinese intelligence.

The report had suggested that a unit of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) had infiltrated the supply chain of server make Super Micro, which supplies Apple, and implanted chips on motherboards that could subsequently be used to exfiltrate information.

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

He continued: "I personally talked to the Bloomberg reporters along with Bruce Sewell, who was then our general counsel. We were very clear with them that this did not happen, and answered all their question. Each time they brought this up to us, the story changed, and each time we investigated we found nothing."

Cook has also taken issue with what he claims is a lack of evidence Bloomberg provided to support its claims.

"We turned the company upside down," he said. "Email searches, data centre 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."

And when asked if a scenario like the one Bloomberg described could occur without him knowing about it, Cook replied: "The likelihood of that is virtually zero."

Bloomberg, though, is standing by its story. It claims that its investigators conducted more than 100 interviews, and added that the story has 17 individual sources to back it up, "including government officials and insiders at the companies".

It concluded: "We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources."

However, last week, US director of national intelligence Dan Coats also claimed that he had seen no evidence to back-up Bloomberg's story.

There's a new wave of automation hitting big business and the public sector, and organisations that fail to prepare or implement properly will, literally, be left for dead.

Hear from end users and other organisations about how you can effectively automate the enterprise at Computing's Automation: streamlining your essential business processes IT Leaders' Forum.

To reserve your FREE place for the event on Wednesday 7 November, check out the dedicate IT Leaders' Forum website