Apple has releases an “Apple Statement” on their own Newsroom service, saying that Business-week’s Article the October 8th release of Businessweek incorrectly reports that Apple has malicious activity on their servers. This seems to be professionally spoken “fake news”. Let’s break down the most important parts of the press release.
The October 8, 2018 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek incorrectly reports that Apple found “malicious chips” in servers on its network in 2015. As Apple has repeatedly explained to Bloomberg reporters and editors over the past 12 months, there is no truth to these claims.
On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement.Siri and Topsy never shared servers; Siri has never been deployed on servers sold to us by Super Micro; and Topsy data was limited to approximately 2,000 Super Micro servers, not 7,000. None of those servers have ever been found to hold malicious chips.
We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple.
Apple has made it clear over and over again that there has been a miscommunication between Apple and these companies, and the reports have been untruthful and not appropriate for them.
You can read the full report here: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got-wrong-about-apple/
Author: Chris Grainger
Chris is a tech enthusiast always looking for new products and services to try out and share with his awesome community of Apple fellows on Appleosophy!
