Experts recently obtained an hour-long audio recording from an internal briefing at Apple titled “Stopping Leakers - Keeping Confidential at Apple.”

The presentation was led by three members of Apple’s Global Security division: director of global security David Rice, director of worldwide investigations Lee Freedman, and Jenny Hubbert, from the Global Security communications and training team. The audio describes the lengths Apple goes to in order to keep information about new products out of the hands of leakers. The Global Security team tasked with this includes previous members from the NSA, the US military, the FBI, and the US Secret Service.

After years toiling away in secret on a car project, Tim Cook has for the first time elaborated on the company’s plans in the automotive market. “We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in a June 5 interview.

“It’s a core technology that we view as very important.” He likened the effort to “the mother of all AI projects,” saying it’s “probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.” The prospect of self-driving cars has seen a slew of technology companies push into the auto industry, according to McKinsey & Co. Alphabet’s Waymo unit has signed partnerships with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Lyft to develop the technology.

Science is worthless if it isn’t motivated by basic human values and the desire to help people, Apple CEO Tim Cook told graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday, urging them to use their powers for good.

In a commencement address, Cook — who as Apple’s chief executive since 2011 has overseen the rollout of the iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch — said the company is constantly looking for ways to combine tech with a sense of humanity and compassion. “Whatever you do in your life, and whatever we do at Apple, we must infuse it with the humanity that we are born with,” said Cook.

Sometimes, it's not external hackers that pose a threat to your privacy -- it's people in the supply chain hoping to make some cash on the side. Police in China's Zhejiang province have arrested 22 (apparently third-party) Apple distributors for allegedly selling iPhone user data.

Officials say the workers searched an internal Apple database for sensitive info, such as Apple IDs and phone numbers, and peddled it on the black market for between $1.50 to $26. All told, the distributors reportedly raked in about $7.36 million, before authorities stepped in. It's not clear how many people are affected by the bootleg sales, or how many of the victims live outside of China.

Apple is one of the largest tech companies in the United States that have been involved in user spying scandals, with many accusing the firm of working with the government on snooping on customers and providing law enforcement with access to their data.

Cupertino, on the other hand, has actually claimed to be doing otherwise, fighting against the government on several occasions, including in early 2016 when it refused to hack a locked iPhone that was allegedly used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists. This time, Apple's name is involved in new snooping claims in regard to the terrorist attacks that took place in the United Kingdom in the last few weeks.

Almost two weeks after Apple Inc. secured permission to test its autonomous-car technology in California, the first images of the vehicle have been captured on Silicon Valley roads. The white Lexus RX450h SUV emerged from an Apple facility this week and was kitted out with an array of sensors, according to a person who saw the vehicle and provided photos.

The sensors included Velodyne Lidar Inc.'s top-of-the-range 64-channel lidar, at least two radar and a series of cameras. The sensors appear to be products bought off the shelf from suppliers, rather than custom-made, according to an industry expert who saw the photos.

Cisco Talos today warned of a flaw in the X.509 certificate validation feature of Apple macOS and iOS that could let an attacker remotely execute code and steal information. X.509 security certificates are widely used and integral to many Internet protocols, including TLS/SSL, which is the basis for HTTPS, the secure web browsing protocol.

“For most people, securely connecting to a website seems as simple as checking to make sure the little padlock in the address bar is present. However, in the background there are many different steps that are taken to ensure you are safely and securely connecting to the websites that claim they are who they are.

Researchers came across a malicious Word document last week that doesn’t discriminate between OS platforms. The malicious Word document is designed to spread malware on either Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, depending on where it’s opened.

Like many other strains of malware these days, the sample relies on tricking users into enabling macros. Once opened and macros are enabled, malicious VBA, or Visual Basic for Applications, code is executed, which runs the AutoOpen() macro. The macro goes on to read a base64-encoded string in the file, which depending on the operating system, executes a certain script.

A hacker or group of hackers is apparently trying to extort Apple over alleged access to a large cache of iCloud and other Apple email accounts. The hackers, who identified themselves as 'Turkish Crime Family', demanded $75,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another increasingly popular crypto-currency, or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in exchange for deleting the alleged cache of data.

"I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing," one of the hackers told. The hackers provided screenshots of alleged emails between the group and members of Apple's security team.

A partnership between the secret-spilling group and Google, Microsoft, and Apple has already hit its first road block. Last week, WikiLeaks promised it would share the technical details and code of the hacking tools that the CIA has allegedly developed against Google, Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies.

This week, after days of waiting, the secret-spilling site finally made initial contact with the companies. But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's attempt to help these major tech companies find out exactly what bugs and vulnerabilities the CIA is or was allegedly taking advantage of, and then plug the holes, is not going very smoothly for now.