Apple reassures customers after teenager hacked its servers

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The CIA has a team of more than 5,000 hackers.
Teenaged hacker recently plead guilty to charges.
Photo: Brian Klug/Flickr CC

Apple has reassured customers that none of their private data was compromised after a 16-year-old teenager plead guilty to hacking into the company’s servers.

An Apple spokesperson said that, “[We] want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised.” The hacker in question managed to download 90 gigabytes of secure files.

Apple said that it had, “discovered the unauthorised access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement,” although it hasn’t discussed the specifics of the incident. The teenager, who can’t be named because he is a juvenile, will be sentenced September 20.

Unlike other companies which have suffered massive security breaches in recent years, Apple has remained relatively scandal free in this domain. The biggest issue it has had to face was a 2014 incident in which hackers released nude celebrity images found on 50 iCloud accounts.

While this was initially reported as an iCloud breach, it transpired that it was the result of a phishing campaign which gained the hackers individual passwords, as opposed to a wider hack. One of the hackers in that incident was sentenced to 18 months in jail, back in 2016.

Last year, Apple denied reports that hackers had gained access up to 559 million customer accounts, and were going to use this to remotely wipe devices of their data. The hackers were demanding $75,000 in cryptocurrencies Bitcoin or Ethereum from Apple, or $100,000 in iTunes gift cards. Apple denied that the threat was legitimate.

Source: RTE

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