Yes, that is what it took for cyber-security reporter, Zack Whittaker at ZDNet to find a hidden advertisement looking for an engineer on Apple’s website. The job listing begins: “Hey there! You found us”, and says the firm is looking for “a talented engineer to develop a critical infrastructure component that is to be a key part of the Apple ecosystem.” It then goes on to ask: “Do you love designing & architecting highly scalable, distributed web services? “Would you want to work on Exabytes of data, tens of thousands of servers, and millions of hard drives?” While the job eligibility requires the candidate to locate the page, the listing also clearly indicates that the Cupertino based company is looking for analytic capabilities. The listing writes, “Experience designing, implementing, and supporting highly scalable applications, and web services. Comfortable working with Java 8. Familiarity with modern server technologies, and familiarity with distributed system ideas.” Mr. Whittaker found the listing (below) at https://us-east-1.blobstore.apple.com, which now shows an “error” message indicating that it has since been deleted or moved somewhere else. “Blobstore” is the name of a series of servers that belong to Apple.
— Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) August 18, 2017 So, how did Mr. Whittaker get to the job listing URL? He discovered it by chance while using Burp Suite, a traffic analyzer, to intercept data being sent from iPhone apps to see what kind of personal data was sent along to advertisers. “Among the stream of connections to analytics sites and advertisers used to track a user’s app consumption, there were several outbound connections to one of Apple’s “blobstore” servers, which the company uses to host iCloud data, such as customer photos and videos. “I entered the web address into a browser, and there you have it,” Mr. Whittaker said. “It’s remarkable to see these companies taking innovative ways to entice people to work for them,” he added. “A lot of times finding a job is down to chance and luck. This definitely keeps things interesting.” Mr. Whittaker however did not apply for the job. “Apple is not looking for me,” he said. Source: BBC
