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Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online—If You Know Where to Look

On the hunt for corporate devices being sold secondhand, a researcher found a trove of Apple corporate data, a Mac Mini from the Foxconn assembly line, an iPhone 14 prototype, and more.

At the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas on Saturday, he's presenting findings from a months-long project in which he scraped secondhand electronics listings from sites like eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and China's Xianyu, and then ran computer vision analysis on them in an attempt to detect devices that were once part of corporate IT fleets. Such iPhones are coveted by both bad actors and security researchers because they often run special versions of iOS that are less locked down than the consumer product and include debugging functionality that's invaluable for gaining insight into the platform. After examining schematics of various generations of Mac Minis, though, Bryant concluded that it was possible the drill had missed the magnetic tray where data would be stored on the hard drive.

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