Apple blasts Bloomberg's report of Chinese infiltration

From Bloomberg’s story: How China infiltrated 30 top US companies by embedding a tiny chip on servers.

The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.

One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.

From Apple’s statement: Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro

Over the course of the past year, Bloomberg has contacted us multiple times with claims, sometimes vague and sometimes elaborate, of an alleged security incident at Apple. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them. We have repeatedly and consistently offered factual responses, on the record, refuting virtually every aspect of Bloomberg’s story relating to Apple.

My take: I’m with 9to5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo, who tweeted:

I’m pretty sure this is unprecedented, I’ve never seen an Apple statement this vociferous about a publication. https://t.co/CMpjmWgyKg pic.twitter.com/lGTTY1lYZU

— Benjamin Mayo (@bzamayo) October 4, 2018