An Australian teenager may have found it amusing enough when he managed to break into Apple’s mainframe to name a folder full of stolen Apple files “hacky hack hack,” but law enforcement has
not found it funny.
As The Guardian reports, the 16-year-old from Melbourne, who’s name can’t be shared publicly due to his age, pleaded guilty in children’s court this week to hacking Apple’s servers. He did this several times over the course of a year and managed to download around 90GB of “secure files” as well as gaining access to customer accounts. He also shared details of how he performed the hacks with a group on WhatsApp.
The boy, who is reportedly a popular figure in the hacking community, used VPNs and other tools to hide his identity. He also got hold of the authorized keys, which are considered extremely secure. The boy “worked flawlessly” in hacking Apple servers, until the U.S. company realized what was happening. Apple’s systems were able to trace the serial numbers of the MacBooks that were used to hack Apple servers.
Apple detected the security breach and informed the FBI who shared the information with the Australian federal police. The boy’s home was subsequently searched and two computers seized which matched the devices detected inside Apple’s systems. The data that had been downloaded was apparently stored in a folder named “hacky hack hack.”
“At Apple, we vigilantly protect our networks and have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats.”
“In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorised access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement.”
” We regard the data security of our users as one of our greatest responsibilities and want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised.”
Techtificator 