A man who went to collect a repaired Mac from his local Apple Store walked away with a hard drive containing confidential information, it has been claimed.
Cult of Mac reports that the man in question was handed the drive, which he assumed was the dead drive that had caused his Mac to fail, at the Apple Store in Stamford, Conneticut.
When he got home and checked the drive to see if any files could be salvaged, he found a complete Apple Retail Store server Time Machine backup disk full of confidential files.
The man, who remains anonymous, told Cult of Mac that the drive 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."
Interestingly, Cult of Mac claims that the man tried to sell it the drive and provided a number of screenshots as proof of what it contained. Cult of Mac turned the offer down, explaining:
"Our tipster originally approached Cult of Mac in the hopes of selling us the hard drive containing these Time Machine backups, and provided us these screenshots as proof. Cult of Mac does not pay for stories, and especially not things like confidential information or iPhone prototypes.
"As such, we strongly advised him to return the hard drive to Apple, and even offered to help facilitate the safe return of the disk if he was nervous about the exchange. We have not heard from him since."
Apple is seemingly having a tough time holding onto its hardware at the moment, with an iPhone 5 prototype going missing from a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco (though there are some doubts as to the authenticity of these claims) and a 3G MacBook prototype on the loose.
Read more about data protection in CSOonline's Data Protection section.