Leaked: How Apple's Security Team Deals With Leakers Of Confidential iPhone, Mac Information

Product leaks are insane party poopers -- or maybe carefully crafted marketing strategies. Who can tell?

While they may not wreck a company's prospects directly, they do cause some amount of discomfort. So it's intriguing to see the lengths a company like Apple is willing to go to in order to keep its secrets away from prying eyes.

The Outline recently obtained an hour-long audio recording of an internal Apple briefing. Titled ¡®Stopping Leakers - Keeping Confidential at Apple¡¯, the presentation in front of 100 people details how employees in their security department need to crack down on leakers, corporate spies, and the press. Ironic that it's been leaked, but the contents of it are intriguing.

The briefing was led by three members of Apple¡¯s Global Security division: director of global security David Rice, director of worldwide investigations Lee Freedman, and Global Security¡¯s communications and training head Jenny Hubbert. Members of the security team include the likes of former members of the NSA, the US military, FBI, and Secret Service.

In the recording, Rice covers the various ways factory workers may try to steal parts, including flushing them down a toilet and retrieving them from the sewer later, and throwing them over the boundary fence. He even recounted one of the more ridiculous incidents to have occurred, saying, ¡°We had 8,000 enclosures stolen a long time ago by women putting it in the underwire of their bra.¡±

Rice believes workers can be tempted to leak hardware parts because of the huge soms of money offered to them by competitors. He says his security team has seen cases where factory workers have been offered amounts equal to their year¡¯s salary just for a few parts. Apple workers in manufacturing make an average of $350 a month, making those offers $4,200 (approximately Rs 270,000) just to leak Apple device parts.

Most of the time, the prime candidate for these thefts are the housing for a device, which often end up in Shenzhen¡¯s electronics market. Rice claims that, in 2013, Apple had to buy back 29,000 iPhone 5C enclosures ahead of its announcement, just to keep it off the news.

However, Rice says the company¡¯s screening policies have gradually strengthened over the years to an impressive degree; thefts and leaks have become the exception instead of the expected norm. Apple screen more than 3 million people every day, among its overseas factories. In 2016, Apple produced 65 million housings, with only four being stolen, a truly impressive step up.

According to Outline, Apple¡¯s crackdown on leaks overseas has been so successful that the company is now turning its eyes towards California. ¡°Last year was the first year that Apple [corporate and development headquarters] leaked more than the supply chain,¡± Rice says in the recording. ¡°More stuff came out of Apple last year than all of our supply chain combined.¡±

However, according to Rice, US leakers from within the company tend to be more accidental in his opinion than financially motivated. Two leakers mentioned in the briefing, one who worked in Apple¡¯s online store and the other on iTunes provided information to blogs, though their motivations weren¡¯t stated. ¡°We oftentimes get people who are really excited about our products and they end up finding something to share and they will go out and say, ¡®Hey, guess what we did.' Or somebody will ask them a question and instead of just saying, ¡®I can't talk about it,¡¯ they will say too much.¡±