Data breaches happen all the time – literally. There is an average of one every 39 seconds.
You’ll hear about the big ones: a breach at a background check company recently leaked some 2.9 billion records, including Social Security numbers and other personal information of millions of Americans; a Supreme Court leak showing its intention to overturn its landmark decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion; all the important details of Apple’s latest iPhone.
The latter just happened. By the time Apple introduced the latest iPhone 16 series in California, we already knew every major announcement in advance.
That’s a big problem, because Apple is notoriously secretive. The company has historically gone to great lengths to track down and punish people who leak everything from internal memos to hardware updates.
Still, like clockwork, a slew of insider leaks gave us a few weeks ahead of all the big news, including photos of the new iPhone 16, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max. We were also aware of all the major updates for AirPods and Apple Watches.
Of course, they were all just rumors until Tim Cook actually took the stage at Apple headquarters and made them all official, but were they? Real? Or was this just the latest case of corporate insider leaks gone haywire?
“With a company as gifted as Apple, who controls the message and has uncontrolled leaks where they no longer have control over their own [event]It’s not ideal,” Troy Batterberry, CEO of EchoMark, said by phone. “It’s damaging and frustrating for all the people on the teams trying to have that great moment when you take the world by storm… it takes the wind out of your sails.”
The crazy thing, though, is that Batterberry says these leaks are now more preventable than ever before, adding that he has the new technology to prove it. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first: why should we worry about insider leaks?
More: Apple releases iOS 18 update for iPhone with tweaks, messages and more
This is why insider leaks like Apple’s are such a threat
Sometimes people leak insider information to ‘be cool’. They want to show the world that they know something that no one else knows. It provides insights on social media. It ‘wins friends and influences people.’ It makes them feel important. Sometimes laypeople think it is in the public’s interest to spread trade secrets.
Others do it for even more nefarious reasons. Maybe they have an ax to grind with their boss. Or they try to get a job with the competition. Sometimes people do it for the money – if they find someone willing to pay for information.
“You have people who want to feel important, want to exert power and control, or try to damage the organization so they can move up,” Dr. Deanna D. Caputo explains during a video call.
Dr. Caputo is chief scientist at MITER, a nonprofit IT and engineering firm that investigates insider leaks from all angles. “The problem is enormous, and the costs are millions and millions every year as we try to protect our economy, our homeland and our personal data.”
How does this relate to Apple… and us?
Apple is the largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.48 trillion. If they can’t keep some of their most important information under control, what does that mean for the rest of us, now that our entire private lives are stored on corporate servers? You know, things like our Social Security numbers, health care records, and financial data—pretty much everything seems to be leaking these days?
“It’s a huge deal to have a breach like this anywhere, but especially at a company like Apple,” agreed Kyle Schlosser, a cybersecurity insider threat management specialist. “If someone can delete that data from their environment without a legitimate business purpose, they have an insider problem.”
According to a recent report from software security company Code42, insider theft is one of the biggest problems facing modern businesses.
In one wrong moment, an employee can erase entire lives of hard work and put intellectual property, customers’ personal information, the company’s money and reputation at risk.
“If we think about that right, someone might not seem physically injured (by insider leaks) – it’s not like when there’s an active shooter where the average American can immediately see and understand the threat and terror – but this is just as bad in many ways,” says Dr. Caputo. “It may be harder to see the impact, but everyone is affected by corporate espionage, whether you realize it or not. It costs money, jobs and even lives.”
But let’s be real here. No one died or lost billions of dollars because someone stole Tim Cook’s big reveal thunder ahead of Apple’s latest press conference. But that’s not often the case with leaks from corporate insiders, say several experts working to stem the rising tide of information theft.
More: Recent Apple updates focus on health technology. Experts think that is a major problem.
Can new technology support insider leaks for good?
I took a closer look down the rabbit hole of this issue after meeting with Troy Batterberry of EchoMark about the launch of a new service they are calling SecureView. But instead of a typical product reveal, our nearly two-hour conversation kept reminding me of the TV show “The Americans.” (That’s the Cold War spy drama in which two Soviet KGB intelligence officers pose as an American married couple living in Virginia.)
The reality of this whole insider leak business is very cloak and dagger, and Batterberry’s solution is, well, mind-boggling.
In a nutshell, the new software uses a new new blend of AI and machine vision with forensic watermarking and steganography (hiding messages within messages) that make all written material (emails, PDFs, downloads and more) just as unique and individualized makes like a fingerprint.
This means that if classified or private information is released, the company can quickly and easily trace it back to the source of the leak.
Batterberry showed me how it all works using one of Tim Cook’s leaked emails to staff from 2021. Without changing the overall meaning of the original message, EchoMark’s AI suggests small changes that result in almost infinite combinations – about 15 simple sentence operations make 435 operations possible. eight million message variations.
That’s a number with 27 zeros.
“Nobody on the planet has done what we’ve done,” Batterberry says. “If everyone knows they are getting a unique copy, they are less likely to leak because they know there is a good chance they will be caught. We tell everyone, “Hey, your copy of the information is now unique. You don’t know how unique it is. It’s hidden everywhere. It’s as if your digital fingerprint is spread across the contents. If you choose to leak this thing, you’ll get caught. ”
When I asked if they could have prevented Apple’s latest news from leaking, he replied, “I believe we could have prevented – or at least dramatically reduced – the chance of this happening.”
While the current focus is on insider leaks, Batterberry says they are already testing to see if this next-generation steganography can solve many other growing societal problems spurred by AI, such as deep fake videos, misinformation and other painful hacks.
“What we’re doing is teaching people that there is a new way to protect your private data. People don’t even know this is possible. That is what we are really pioneering.”
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer technology columnist and an on-air contributor for The Today Show. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY. Contact her at JJ@Techish.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Modern businesses need a solution to data breaches – even Apple
