Apple store accidentally gives customer hard drive with top secret files

Apple seems to have this nasty habit of losing their products – last year with the iPhone 4, and this year they have supposedly misplaced the iPhone 5 (although this has yet to be verified), and now it seems that they accidentally gave away a hard drive full of the Apple Store’s internal file server that is supposedly filled with top secret and confidential documents, and this is how it happened.

According to Cult of Mac who broke the story, a tipster sent them an email explaining the situation of how he sent his Mac in for repairs, but due to the hard drive requiring a replacement, he got his Mac back with a brand new hard drive and was handed a hard drive by Apple Genius at the store, which he assumed was his old and dead hard drive.

He then plugged it into a USB enclosure in an attempt to see if he could salvage anything, but when he plugged it in he realized that this was a completely different hard drive and it appeared to be a complete Apple Retail Store server Time Machine backup disk. He then offered to sell the hard drive to Cult of Mac who declined.

He then sent some screen shots of what was on the hard drive and it appeared to have contained “confidential docs, internal manuals, Apple’s sales technics, an Apple store work checklist, products layout, time schedules, pictures and videos of Apple corporate activities that only Apple employees can see, videos of store meetings, business structure and much much much more.”

Cult of Mac reported that the files look legit, but since they did not actually see it for themselves, and since there’s no way of knowing unless someone actually buys the hard drive off him, we’re going to have to take this at face value. Personally I’m just waiting for information regarding the much anticipated iPhone 5; do you think there’s any info stored in the hard drive about Apple’s next-generation iPhone?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: Apple Inc, apple store, backup, hard drive, Storage