Apple loses iPhones, seeks security experts
Apple employees lose valuable prototype iPhones and now the company appears to be looking for additional know-how in product protection.
The day after CNET reported that Apple had lost control of another valuable iPhone prototype--the second misplaced prototype handset in the past 18 months--the company began looking for people to help protect unreleased products.
David Murphy at PCmag.com made a nice catch today by noting Apple posted two job openings on Thursday for managers of "New Product Security." Maybe it's a coincidence that the positions opened up when they did, but the job descriptions certainly sound like a response to Apple's troubles of late for losing test gadgets.
"The candidate will be responsible for overseeing the protection of, and managing risks to, Apple's unreleased products and related intellectual property," said the post.
Apple representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Wednesday, the CNET report pushed the bounds of believability for some. An iPhone was taken into a San Francisco tequila bar in July by an unidentified Apple employee who somehow lost control of the device. The circumstances were strangely similar to an incident in April 2010, when another Apple employee lost an iPhone 4 prototype in a Bay Area beer garden.
Could this really happen to Apple again?
San Francisco Police confirmed on Friday that they assisted an Apple security team to search a home in the city's Bernal Heights neighborhood where Apple had electronically tracked the phone. The device wasn't found there.
While it was easy to draw parallels between those two events, there were other signs that Apple's problems went beyond iPhones. Colleague Josh Lowensohn reported last week that Apple is trying to retrieve a prototype laptop that is in the possession of Carl Frega, a North Carolina resident who said he acquired the unreleased device via a Craigslist ad. He bought the machine thinking it was only good for spare parts.
On the same day that Apple posted the job openings, an Apple store customer was
This is significant because this is Apple, a company that has forged quite a reputation over the years for secret keeping and message managing. Apple execs like to spring new devices to great fanfare at very rehearsed and controlled press events. Lots of people have commented in the past week that they suspect the misplaced gadgets is thanks to some kind of Apple publicity stunt.
But the job postings last week seem to indicate that a far more plausible reason for the lost devices may be little less conspiratorial. Apple's security seems to have slipped a bit and the company is trying to correct the problem.