There is no reason to believe than Tim Cook or any executive would be aware of anything.
In large companies with a hundred thousand employees and contractors, barely anyone is aware of anything.
Ask a thousand people about project something and they will assert in good faith that they have never heard of it. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, just that you didn't find the handful of people who knows about it.
>There is no reason to believe than Tim Cook or any executive would be aware of anything.
The minute this story hit publication you can bet internal security teams at Apple would have validated it and submitted findings to Tim Cook. At this point Tim Cook, along with his legal team, has all the facts as they pertain to Apple and Apple suppliers and every component inside Apple devices. You don't come out without a strong denial like that unless you are sure you can back it up.
Unless there are moles on both sides inside of Apple, and the PRC-malicious-chip-installation moles managed to destroy evidence and silence witnesses. That sounds vaguely fantastic, but "PRC installing malicious chips on server motherboards and Anonymous Sources discovering those chips and leaking news to Bloomberg" is already well into spy vs. spy territory.
Bloomberg said that Apple changed supplier over the rogue chip. To hide this the mole to non-mole ratio inside Apple would have to be very high. Unbelievably high.
Yeah, that is typically the case, sure. But you are comparing business-as-usual operations to an incident investigation. Sure, Tim Cook likely new nothing or very little about the organization's business dealings with Super Micro before the story broke, but not now. If this story is true, the implications for Apple are huge. It makes them look inept and creates a large problem that must be solved. Tim Cook would be very aware of any potential problem at this point.
This. Apple is a large enough, and competent enough, organization to investigate this internally.
Some will say "but the people involved have a gag order, and nobody investigating, including tim cook or legal knows". This doesn't make any sense.
People without a clearance are not obligated to keep it a secret, and can investigate for themselves. So either everyone competent to investigate this has a clearance and/or is gagged (i.e., many thousands of people) and if that were the case it'd almost certainly make to Tim Cook's radar.
Or not that many people are gagged, and Apple has thousands of engineers that could be looking into this, and they found nothing. I find that much more plausible.
Suppose this was a malicious attack, and PRC intelligence within SuperMicro and perhaps even Apple are responsible for these machines getting shipped and installed by Apple. Let's further suppose that the plot was uncovered by US counterintelligence.
Why the heck would US counterintelligence operate inside of Apple, discover security vulnerabilities that affect Apple in particular, hide this discovery from Apple's senior management, and then go on to leak it to Bloomberg while continuing to cover it up on the inside of Apple?
There is a reasonable-ish explanation for this. US counterintelligence usually falls under the purview of the FBI, and the FBI has had a couple public spats with Tim Cook over the years. Given Apple's commitment to user privacy, it's reasonable to presume that Tim Cook would not knowingly allow the FBI to infiltrate Apple. It's also reasonable to assume that, given any number of motives both virtuous and vicious, the FBI would have a vested interest in infiltrating Apple. In this scenario, notifying Apple management about these issues would risk revealing sources and methods.
At this point, the only remaining question is: why wouldn't the moles just quietly inform Apple management about the issue? Clearly, Apple personnel who are in the business of receiving and installing server hardware would have a defensible cover for poking around and raising questions about weird chips that mysteriously appeared on the hardware. There are possible explanations for this, but at that point we're just compounding conspiracy theories on conspiracy theories.
I'm flabbergasted that you are being downvoted. I have the same opinion as you, but to the point where i think it's almost fact... executives at a company that size (# of employees) don't know anything.
It's up to Bloomberg to prove their hypothesis is true, but don't see how Apple can say it's without a doubt untrue.
In large companies with a hundred thousand employees and contractors, barely anyone is aware of anything.
Ask a thousand people about project something and they will assert in good faith that they have never heard of it. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, just that you didn't find the handful of people who knows about it.