Apple denies cybersecurity breach to Congress

Apple’s top security employee told Congress on Monday that it has not found anything to suggest that its systems were compromised through a sophisticated breach of its supply chain.

George Stathakopoulos, the company’s vice president of information security, wrote in a letter to the Senate Commerce and House Energy and Commerce committees that Apple had conducted multiple investigations and not found evidence of the cybersecurity breaches detailed in a story published by Bloomberg Businessweek last week.

“We are eager to share the facts in this matter because, were this story true, it would rightly raise grave concerns,”  Stathakopoulos wrote in his letter.{mosads}

The article reported that chips manufactured by Super Micro had been compromised by the Chinese government, which installed small chips, slightly larger than a grain of rice, onto motherboards which were sold to other companies including those with U.S. government contracts and Apple and Amazon.

Amazon has also denied the veracity of Bloomberg Businessweek’s report.

Apple said that it had conducted internal investigations on the claims in the Bloomberg report, but said that the most important points of the story were false.

“In the end, our internal investigations directly contradict every consequential assertion made in the article,” Stathakopoulos wrote.

“Apple has never found malicious chips, ‘hardware manipulations’ or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server,” he continued. “We never alerted the FBI to any security concerns like those described in the article, nor has the FBI ever contacted us about such an investigation.”

Apple has also denied the report in a public statement, as well as a statement to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Its denial to Congress follows the top British cyber agency supporting it and Amazon’s claims that it did not have evidence of such an attack occurring.