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In an Unprecedented Move, Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls For Bloomberg To Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story (buzzfeednews.com)
John Paczkowski and Joseph Bernstein, reporting for BuzzFeed News: Apple CEO Tim Cook, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, went on the record for the first time to deny allegations that the company was the victim of a hardware-based attack carried out by the Chinese government. And, in an unprecedented move for the company, he called for a retraction of the story that made this claim. Earlier this month Bloomberg Businessweek published an investigation alleging Chinese spies had compromised some 30 US companies by implanting malicious chips into Silicon Valley bound servers during their manufacture in China. The chips, Bloomberg reported, allowed the attackers to create "a stealth doorway" into any network running on a server in which they were embedded. Apple was alleged to be among the companies attacked, and a focal point of the story. [...] "We turned the company upside down," Cook said. "Email searches, datacenter 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." A Bloomberg spokesperson said, "We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources."
They're still insisting that it was a firmware-only bug, and that Bloomberg is confused. Bloomberg's reply is that they're not confused, there were a whole stack of security problems that they've uncovered evidence of.
Between the two, one side (Apple) claiming knowledge of one exploint, and the other side (Bloomberg) claiming knowledge of multiple exploits, it seems obvious to me that if Bloomberg was wrong, Apple wouldn't know. You know what you do know, you don't know the things you never learned. You prove positives, not negatives.
If Apple truly doesn't know about the exploit... why would they be asking for a retraction? They would be ignorant about if it happened or not, they wouldn't know. The only way to know is if it did happen, and they know that!
Plus, it isn't like Apple had given people details in the past. They only came up with supposed details from years ago this year when the new accusations came out.
Apple demanding a retraction basically proves all of Bloomberg's story, because Apple would only know if it is true if it is true! If it was false, they don't know, they can only say, "we never heard any of this." The nature of the story is such that if you didn't know while it was happening, you still wouldn't know after it happened. Especially if it was only a small number of devices that got the extra hardware.