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Internal Investigation on Fake Apple Email
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Aloha everyone,
Here's yet another spin on this story. I was listening to the "This Week in Tech" or TWiT podcast, and their take is that the fake memo was INTENTIONALLY released, internally, by Apple to expose a leaker. Apparently, Apple is just a bit peeved when information leaks out, and it is the impression of Leo Laporte that Apple wanted to catch the leaker in the act. To that end, Apple apparently sent out the erroneous information, and will use the external email trail, if any, to determine the identity of the leaker, who will then become an ex-Apple employee.
That sound much more plausible than someone out to spike the stock price, but that's just me
HawaiiMacAddict
If this were true, then Apple is facing another stockholder law suit.
Ill wait until October
Just because Apple said it was not true is not enough for me to believe them. They lied too many times now.
Ill wait for October and see, mean time either one could be correct.
Just because Apple said it was not true is not enough for me to believe them. They lied too many times now.
Ill wait for October and see, mean time either one could be correct.
See the Signature \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/
The original Quotation is as follows:
Also, remember that this occurred just before option-expiration Friday. For someone holding a large number of puts or short calls (or for someone who was massively short the stock), there would be a huge vested interest in using disinformation to temporarily drop the stock price. You can make a lot of money fast with options, but the opposite also holds true.
As someone who just weeks before transfered $2K of stocks to Apple, I do not find this amusing.
(ex)Employees who leak secrets is one thing, falsified emails of product delays suck.
(ex)Employees who leak secrets is one thing, falsified emails of product delays suck.
I don't see anything criminal here, really... Fraud maybe, if you can stretch the definition that far.
This has nothing to do with stock manipulation-- it was all internal to Apple. Maybe, if you can find a pattern of doing this at other companies, you could argue that the sender anticipated this getting leaked to the press-- but more likely he anticipated an instantaneous response from the Executives and was doing this to goose an ex-boss.
The people who should get asked the questions are the IT folks that let an outsider (or un-authorized insider) trigger a corporate wide broadcast. It sounds to me like there was just a magic email address that forwarded along and it may have been open to the outside. These should have all required human approval.
[Edit: changed the severity of the penalty suggested for IT.]
And I'm guessing this wasn't ITs fault either-- whatever mechanism was in place had probably been around for 20 years.
This has all been blown out of proportion. Apple got their noses tweaked-- whatever...
The email did not write itself, it did not sent itself, and the email did not disabled/bypass controls in order to spread itself. A person or group did, so yes there are people to blame.
There is probably a large number of people that could take the blame.
Also if it were to come out that this was a way to detect a leak as some people have argued, then lawyers for stock holders could argue that if Apple suspected a leak, that it was gross negligence in their part to do the test to begin with and cause stockholders to lose money.
No offense, but I think you are assuming facts not in evidence. In most investigations, the culprit is stupid and leaves an obvious trail to themselves. When that does not happen, investigators first look to see who benefits. In this case, two obvious groups come to the forefront; monkey-wrenchers - internal/external (aided) provocateur, and those who might gain financially. Other possibilities exist, but at a lower possibility.
Most companies, with more than ~50 employees, have mail distribution groups. All someone needs is an unsecured group password to perform an internal spam. It is also not unusual to have an internal, limited access user/password for some specialized usage. It is not a good security practice to do so, but it happens.
As someone who just weeks before transfered $2K of stocks to Apple, I do not find this amusing.
Why should you be worried or anything? Any dip this kind of news causes is short-term. Do you panic every time stock you own goes down few points?
Yes, Apple and it's investors are clearly doomed
Conspiracy theory:
Perhaps Apple created the fake email themselves to try and sniff out the source of leaks from within their company?!
You should seriously think about the consequences for a company doing this. If Apple were caught doing anything as stupid as this, every single shareholder who lost money because of this would get their money back from Apple, and there were tens of millions of shares traded in a few minutes, each with a loss of about four dollars. Somewhere between 50 and 100 million dollars, excluding any court cost and fines. And there would most definitely be jail time for someone.
A plunge that lasted 30 minutes? Yeah, right. People were jumping out of windows for that.
Most shareholders didn't even find out about this "plunge" until the next day, when the stock had more than recovered.
Well, journalists are supposed to behave ethically. In actual practice, I see little difference. There plenty of "journalists" with no integrity, and plenty of bloggers that are very careful with their facts.
The only real difference between the two terms that I can see is that a "journalist" works for an established news-delivering corporation and the blogger is working for himself. And even that's not very accurate.
I would guess that nearly all companies have little-to-no security on their mailing lists. Several years ago, at my company, I accidentally put the wrong address on an e-mail and it went to the entire division (about 600 recipients) instead of my project's development team (about 50 recipients.)
Yes, this is a problem. No, it's not unique to any corporation.
It dropped about 2.7%. It regained most of that loss within 25 minutes. It regained the rest by the start of business the next morning.
You should seriously think about the consequences for a company doing this. If Apple were caught doing anything as stupid as this, every single shareholder who lost money because of this would get their money back from Apple, and there were tens of millions of shares traded in a few minutes, each with a loss of about four dollars. Somewhere between 50 and 100 million dollars, excluding any court cost and fines. And there would most definitely be jail time for someone.
Agree 100%, Hope that Apple was not that stupid.
Now guess what happens if someone put the mailing list "entire division" into the mailing list "entire division".
Worst story that I heard was one guy going on holiday, and setting up his email to respond automatically with some out-of-office message. He made two mistakes: A. The message was sent automatically to the entire company instead of the person mailing him. That mistake on its own would have been pretty annoying. But B. The message sent automatically requested a reply from the receiver.
Can you guess what happened about two seconds after the first message was received on his computer?