Apple Intern Reportedly Leaked iPhone Source Code (theverge.com)

Earlier this week, a portion of iOS source code was posted online to GitHub, and in an interesting twist, a new report from Motherboard reveals that the code was originally leaked by a former Apple intern. The Verge reports: According to Motherboard, the intern who stole the code took it and distributed it to a small group of five friends in the iOS jailbreaking community in order to help them with their ongoing efforts to circumvent Apple's locked down mobile operating system. The former employee apparently took "all sorts of Apple internal tools and whatnot," according to one of the individuals who had originally received the code, including additional source code that was apparently not included in the initial leak. The plan was originally to make sure that the code never left the initial circle of five friends, but apparently the code spread beyond the original group sometime last year. Eventually, the code was then posted in a Discord chat group, and was shared to Reddit roughly four months ago (although that post was apparently removed by a moderation bot automatically). But then, it was posted again to GitHub this week, which is when things snowballed to where they are now, with Apple ordering GitHub to remove the code.

Comments

Re:This is why we can't have nice things

[tlhIngan]

And now this intern has ruined life for all other interns in the company - past, present, and future. I'm sure all of the current interns have gotten a "leak like this guy and we'll ruin you" speech by now, and I bet web crawlers are already trained on past employees and interns looking for a hint of anything similar. Future interns will have to sign away even more of their rights, be locked down even harder, and feel like a prisoner while they're working. Thanks, asshole, for ruining the intern experience for everyone.

I think you're understating the seriousness. I think companies everywhere are re-evaluating their interns. After all, Apple is well known to have security down pat - defense in depth, layered security, and that's just the physical side (you have secure rooms within secure rooms...).

And Apple had a breach. Every company is probably looking over their security and their interns because if it happened at Apple, there's no telling it couldn't happen to them. Even worse, if you interned at Apple, you may find yourself at the end of the distrust stick - if you leaked out Apple's stuff, who's to say you won't leak out our stuff?

Heck, if Apple finds out which intern did it, they're pretty much out of the tech industry. No company will want to touch someone who deliberately leaks their company's secrets. Get branded as someone who violates NDA, become an untouchable. And Apple doesn't even need to press heavy charges - given the age of the code, the damage will likely be minimal, so even if Apple asked for a token $1, the fact that the person violated NDAs is the far greater punishment.