Apple Tells Congress 'Nothing Was Ever Found' to Suggest Alleged Supply Chain-Based Hack
Apple's top security chief told the U.S. Congress on Sunday that it had found no indication of suspicious transmissions or other evidence that its China supply chain was ever compromised (via Reuters).
In a letter to the Senate and House commerce committees, Apple Vice President for Information Security George Stathakopoulos wrote that the company had repeatedly investigated and found no evidence to support Bloomberg Businessweek's bombshell report that alleged tiny chips were discovered inside Apple servers which allowed for backdoor transmissions to Chinese spies.
"Apple's proprietary security tools are continuously scanning for precisely this kind of outbound traffic, as it indicates the existence of malware or other malicious activity. Nothing was ever found," he wrote in the letter provided to Reuters.
Stathakopoulos repeated Apple's statements to the press that it had never found any such planted chips or been contacted by the FBI over the alleged matter. The letter follows a statement issued on Saturday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security saying it had no reason to doubt the companies who denied that they had ever discovered the tiny chips.
Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all strongly rebutted the report, which alleged that Chinese intelligence planted microchips in Supermicro servers, which Apple and Amazon previously used in their data centers.
Despite the denials, which are also backed by the UK's national cyber security agency, retired Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell, and other unnamed Apple senior executives, Bloomberg said it stood by its report as of Friday, but didn't immeditately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Popular Stories
Apple has returned to using two 128GB storage chips in the new Mac mini with 256GB of storage, according to a partial teardown video shared on social media today. This means the base-model Mac mini with the M4 chip will not have significantly slower SSD speeds compared to higher-end configurations of the computer with 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB of storage, as multiple NAND chips allows for faster SSD...
Black Friday sales are continuing today with Best Buy kicking off early Black Friday deals that will last for the next few days. Similar to other retailers, Best Buy's early Black Friday event includes sitewide savings on Apple products, headphones, TVs, monitors, video games, and more.
Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may...
Law enforcement officials in Detroit, Michigan are warning other police officers about an alleged iPhone change that causes Apple devices stored for forensic examination to spontaneously restart, reports 404 Media.
iPhones that are undergoing examination have apparently been rebooting, which makes them harder to unlock with brute force methods, and Michigan police think that it's due to a...
Apple today seeded the second betas of upcoming iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2 updates to developers, and Apple is continuing to refine the Apple Intelligence capabilities. There are also a handful of smaller features that are worth knowing about.
Find My
Find My has a new option to Share Item Location with an "airline or trusted person" that can help you locate something that you've misplaced....
The first wave of reviews of Apple's new M4-powered MacBook Pro models were published this morning. We've collected some of the latest impressions from YouTube channels and select media outlets below.
Apple last month announced the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, adding next-generation M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips, with Thunderbolt 5 ports on higher-end models, display and camera ...
High Power Mode is available on the 14-inch MacBook Pro, 16-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini models with the M4 Pro chip, according to Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham. The feature was previously limited to Macs with Apple's highest-end "Max" chip, so this is the first time it is available on Macs with a "Pro" chip.
This is the second time that Apple has expanded availability of High Power...
Black Friday is just around the corner, and Apple Watch deals have begun appearing ahead of the shopping holiday on November 29. In this article, we'll take a look at all of the best early Black Friday Apple Watch deals, including the new Series 10 models.
Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small...
Apple in September updated its iCloud terms and conditions with some minor changes, and this week it has been notifying iPhone users that they must accept the revised terms in order to continue using iCloud. Unfortunately, after accepting the new terms, some iPhone users have seen all of their notes disappear in the Notes app.
While some users have turned to social media to justifiably panic ...