A report emerged in Australia yesterday about Apple being the victim of a successful hacking attack.
Reuters reported that an unnamed Australian teenager managed to downloaded over 90 GB of data from Apple servers.
Apple state that no personal customer data was compromised or exposed during the worrying incident.
The 16-year-old managed to gain access into a central Apple server multiple times during the course of the year. The details of what material he was able to access and download has not been reported by Apple although The Age newspaper in Australia reports that customer data had been accessed and that the boy had managed to obtain Apple customers’ authorised keys – their login access.
Hacky Hacky Hack
Not the subtlest individual, he collected the gigabytes of secure, confidential company files and saved them in a folder called, and we are not making this up, ‘hacky hacky hack’. It was also reported that the boy had boasted about his activities on the WhatsApp mobile messaging service.
Apple said that as soon as they became aware of the data breach, they reported it to the FBI who in turn passed the information on to their equivalent partners in the Australian Federal Police.
The AFP then searched his home and seized two computers. The serial numbers of those devices matched those of the ones that had been used to access the internal systems a prosecutor told the court.
Pleaded Guilty
An Apple spokesman responded to questions “the company’s information security personnel discovered the unauthorized access, contained it and reported the incident to law enforcement.
“We want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised” but did not comment further on any of the specifics of the case.
Unsurprisingly, the teenager has pleaded guilty in court and will be sentenced when he next appears in court on September 20th.
