14 DAY TRIAL // A 16-year-old Melbourne private schoolboy hacked Apple's servers for more than a year, and it is now facing criminal charges after the Cupertino, California-based tech giant contacted the FBI to report the hack.
The Age reports today that a 16-year-old Australian kid from Melbourne repeatedly hacked Apple's servers from his suburban home because he proclaims himself as the biggest fan of the company and thought he's doing a good thing.
During the hacking sessions, the Australian teen reportedly had downloaded about 90GB of secure files, including extremely secure authorised keys that grant log-in access to users, and accessed multiple user accounts.
He was caught last year by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) after a raid on his home, but everything was kept secret until now the teen is well known in the international hacking communit and he could be exposed to risk.
"Two Apple laptops were seized and the serial numbers matched the serial numbers of the devices which accessed the internal systems,” said a prosecutor. "A mobile phone and hard drive were also seized and the IP address matched the intrusions into the organisation."
Hacky hack hack
During the raid at the teen's home in Melbourne, the Australian Federal Police has discovered a series of hacking files and the software that allowed the 16-year-old to hack Apple's servers repeatedly, all stored, not so safely, in an unencrypted folder entitled "hacky hack hack."
The teen then shared his hacking to others via WhatsApp, but in the end, Apple's security team detected his presence on their servers and blocked him. The teen told the police that he hacked Apple because he "dreamed of" working for technology giant, who recently become world's first trillion-dollar company.
At the moment of writing, Apple did not give a statement on what information those 90GB of secure files contained, nor if the accessed customer accounts are in danger. The 16-year-old, who pleaded guilty, is now waiting for his sentence, due next month.
Update 17/08/18: Apple has given a statement to the press assuring its customers that no personal data was comprimised in the hack. "We ... want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised," said an Apple spokesman to Routers.