You don't need to resort to spooky forces to imagine why Apple wants to deny an attack on their security. It damages the value of the company, especially in a time when they try to market themselves as security conscious.
If the Bloomberg story is true 30 US companies were targeted by this hack, not just Apple or Amazon. Adding in the government agencies as well that’s a huge number of people who must know about this, at least in the hundreds and possibly over a thousand. In addition there must be thousands of these hacked boards all over the place, including discarded faulty and test units, to be found and checked by experts. There’s no way all of them could have been accounted for. Also if the US was hacked this way, what about other countries? There must be evidence all over the place.
For Apple to believe that they could get away with outright bare faced lying about this, they would have to be very confident none of those people across dozens of ogrganisations would either break ranks or mistakenly corroborate the story, and none of the copious physical evidence would ever be found.
The question is, do you believe that’s the sort of risk they are likely to take?
What damages the company more is leadership that lies about or covers up hard truths they are ethically and legally obligated to share. That would be more damning than a breach.
and yet PR departments routinely resort to salami tactics or evasion even if they have obviously messed up. This isn't really out of the ordinary, and I think jumping to conclusions about the US government controlling Apple is a bigger leap.
