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Tim Cook says Businessweek should retract China security story: ‘We turned the company upside down’

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Apple CEO Tim Cook has finally broken his silence on the Bloomberg Businessweek report and denies all allegations that the company was a victim of a hardware-based attack.

Cook says, “there is no truth in their story about Apple,” which is yet another statement made by the company and its executives indicating that Businessweek’s story was completely false.

In the past, Apple has never made public statements regarding rumors or reporting, despite some stories being completely false.

Cook says he was “involved” since the beginning and has “personally talked to the Bloomberg reporters” and Bruce Sewel regarding the report. Going so far as to say, “each time they brought this up to us, the story changed and each time we investigated we found nothing.”

“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.”

Needless to say, Apple took this report very seriously and wants to make it clear that there is no indication that the company had been compromised in such a manner.

Businessweek told Buzzfeed in a statement:

Bloomberg Businessweek’s investigation is the result of more than a year of reporting, during which we conducted more than 100 interviews,” a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in response to a series of questions. “Seventeen individual sources, including government officials and insiders at the companies, confirmed the manipulation of hardware and other elements of the attacks. We also published three companies’ full statements, as well as a statement from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources.”

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