An Intern At Apple Stole And Then Leaked Critical iPhone Source Code, Says Report

by Eric Lieberman

A former intern at Apple reportedly leaked a portion of source code for iOS, the proprietary iPhone operating system.

Reports of the stolen data first surfaced earlier this week after the exclusive computing language was found online on GitHub, a web-based hosting service where anyone can post computer code for communal use. But now the culprit has been pinpointed, at least partially, after Motherboard detailed how it discovered how the leak occurred, including through sources close to the intern.

Those contacts told the tech publication that the intern didn’t have it out for Apple because of personal gripes, but rather that they convinced him to in order to contribute to security research they had been conducting.

“He pulled everything, all sorts of Apple internal tools and whatnot,” a friend of the intern told Motherboard.

“I was really paranoid about it getting leaked immediately by one of us,” another one of the original people to receive the code said. “Having the iBoot source code and not being inside Apple … that’s unheard of.”

The unnamed sources who received the code said while it’s a huge deal, at least one of them “knew one day that if those kids [within Apple] got it they’d be dumb enough to push it to GitHub.”

Apple has ordered GitHub to remove the code, although it still likely remains on several other platforms on the internet, specifically resources and portals used by the jailbreaking community.

Apple did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment in time of publication.

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