A sensitive component iOS source code was leaked by a former Apple employee

A sensitive component iOS source code was leaked by a former Apple employee

According to News, the intern who took the code took it and shared it to a small group of five colleagues in the iOS jailbreaking community in order to help them with their continuing efforts to circumvent Apple’s secured down mobile operating system. The former agent apparently took “all sorts of Apple internal tools and whatnot,” according to one of the individuals who had first received the code, including additional source code that was obviously not included in the initial leak.

The plan was originally to secure that the code never left the original circle of five friends, but apparently, the code flowed beyond the original group sometime last year. Finally, the code was then posted in a Discord chat group and was given to Reddit roughly four months ago although that post was obviously removed by a moderation bot automatically.

But then, it was posted repeatedly to GitHub this week, which is while things snowballed to where they are now, with Apple requesting GitHub to remove the code. 

According to News, a source at Apple claims that the organization was previously aware of the leak before it made it to GitHub, which would make sense since it appears to have been moved around the jailbreaking community for some time already. Apple itself seems cool about the potential security issues, with the business noting in a statement that the code is already three years old.

According to one of the aforementioned friends, the former intern managed to steal "all sorts of Apple's internal tools". This corroborates with Motherboard's verification that additional source code and file names that were not part of the GitHub leak were spotted in screenshots of the code.

Two of the people from the original circle of five stated that they never wanted the code to spread due to fear of legal action. However, no one from the group has confirmed leaking the code to any outsiders, and the identities of all five remain anonymous. The former intern declined to give any statement to Motherboard, referring to a non-disclosure agreement he had signed with Apple.