Former Apple employee who stole autopilot development secrets launches his own startup

Former Apple employee Wen Weibao, who was previously accused of stealing trade secrets related to the development of the company’s autopilot, has become one of the leaders of the Chinese startup Jidu. Weibao is now engaged in the development of self-driving cars in his home country. This was reported by CNBC.

It is known that Weibao has been serving as Jidu’s senior technical director since August 2021. In 2016−2018, he worked at Apple in the division that developed autopilot and electric vehicles.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Weibao stole the source code of Apple’s autopilot to later pass it on to Chinese accomplices. If the man returns to the United States, he faces up to 10 years in prison.

Weibao became the third former Apple employee of Chinese descent to be accused of stealing corporate trade secrets related to the production of self-driving cars. Last year in August, Zhang Xiaolan pleaded guilty to stealing Apple’s secret information, and Jerry Chen is awaiting trial.

As a reminder, Google engineer Dan Reva discovered a dangerous vulnerability in the macOS version of the Telegram messenger that activates the camera and microphone without the device owner’s knowledge. The vulnerability allows an attacker to inject a dynamic library (Dylib) with malware inside Telegram for macOS. The hacker can record video from the camera and save the recordings to a hidden folder.