After days of being down, Apple has explained why its Developer Center is unavailable. The above message is being emailed out to registered developers and the press, revealing that the developer site was targeted by a hacker earlier this week.
Apple is saying there’s no evidence personal data was stolen, but the hack was serious enough to warrant a complete shutdown and internal restructuring of the site’s database.
Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.
In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.
Apple told Macworld that “the website that was breached was not associated with any customer information; all customer information is securely encrypted.” No app-related information was stolen either. It looks like developers’ credentials were targeted, so if you’re a part of the program, now may be a good time to change your password.
This is the longest time Apple’s dev portal has been down, and it’s also the first public instance of the site being attacked by hackers.
