The so-called “Turkish Crime Family” hackers who claim they’ve got access to hundreds of millions of Apple customer accounts have raised their ransom demand from $75,000 to a whopping $700,000.
The group, which is apparently based in the U.K., has threatened to remotely wipe users’ devices, or reset iCloud accounts, if it’s not paid by April 7. Apple has denied that the hackers have breached iCloud, although the accounts themselves are real.
In a message posted on the website Pastebin, the hackers write that:
“Apple has now announced that they were not breached which no one claimed they were other than some journalists who misunderstood the situation, they announced this for their user’s comfort & to make them feel better about their selves as they’re very insecure with their company.
They have basically announced what we have told them which is that there was no breach, this has nothing to do with a breach.
The whole ‘thing’ not being a breach doesn’t change any claims that were made by us, the entire DB was acquired and built from multiple DB’s that we have been selling in the past 5 years as we decided to keep all our @icloud.com, @me.com & mac.com domains due to those domains not having a popular demand in the cracking community.”
They also note that they’re still in touch with Apple, and claim they have the ability to carry out factory resets of 637,500 accounts per minute, which equates to 38,250,000 million account reset per hour.
In terms of the amount demanded of Apple, they note that the sum of $75,000 was inaccurately given to Apple, and should instead be $100,000 per person for the seven members of the hacker team. “We also requested additional stuff from Apple which we would prefer to keep it private,” they write.
Apple has acknowledged the veracity of email addresses and passwords, but claims this, “appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services.” A separate report from ZDNet suggests that at least a portion of the accounts mentioned are legit — although they may also be a few years old.
Apple has suggested that users protect themselves from possible attacks by employing strong passwords, not recycling passwords across different sites, and turning on two-factor authentication.
Source: Daily Mail
