A former Apple intern has been blamed for a leak of iOS source code. The intern reportedly distributed it to five friends in the iOS jailbreaking community, and the code eventually spread out of this group:
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.
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 DMCA notice GitHub received from Apple that resulted in the takedown of the ZioShiba/iBoot repository.
Related:
Leak of iBoot Code to GitHub Could Potentially Help iPhone Jailbreakers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Sunday February 11 2018, @04:59PM
If the code had been stolen, Apple would be no longer able to sell iphones that boot and work.
Poor, deprived Apple, whatever will they do.
No.
The code was almost certainly copied in violation of the law, if the account here is correct, but the law violated would not have been larceny or other "stealing something" related law--it would have been a violation of laws involving copyright, trade secret revelation, etc.