We all know the story of the prototype iPhone 4 that was left at a bar, spoiling what could have been one of the biggest surprises in Apple history.

But have you heard the one about the stolen prototype iPhones that are still winding up in unintended hands — in this case, hackers bent on finding ways to break into Apple’s operating system?

That’s the focus of a new Motherboard investigation this week, which claims there’s now a gray market for “dev-fused” iPhone prototypes that have been stolen from Apple’s production lines. They’re devices which are uniquely valuable for helping security researchers find vulnerabilities because they run a less hardened version of the OS where root access is trivial to obtain, according to the report.

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