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Australian Teenager Pleads Guilty to Hacking Apple's Network

posted by martyb on Monday August 20 2018, @02:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the hacky-sack dept.

takyon writes:

Apple files stored by teen in 'hacky hack hack' folder

A teenage boy from Australia has pleaded guilty to hacking into Apple's network and downloading internal files, according to reports. The 16-year-old accessed 90 gigabytes worth of files, breaking into the system many times over the course of a year from his suburban home in Melbourne, reports The Age newspaper.

It says he stored the documents in a folder called 'hacky hack hack'.

Apple insists that no customer data was compromised. But The Age reports that the boy had accessed customer accounts.

In a statement to the BBC, Apple said: "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."

Also at Reuters.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 20 2018, @02:27PM (1 child)

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday August 20 2018, @02:27PM (#723768) Journal

    Notice also the use of "serial numbers". Apple was compromised, but still managed to access and log the unique serial numbers of the devices the kid used. How'd they do that? Tracking must be ubiquitous and routine. I find that the most troubling thing about this incident. Need any more evidence that our hardware is treacherous, indeed, can't really be considered ours?

    I'm calling bullshit on this one. Either law enforcement is making it up, misreported it or the news agency misunderstood or erroneous reported it. If it was in fact made up by law enforcement, it could be a cheap cover story for any illegal wiretapping they used to obtain the kids whereabouts. It's probably the easiest story for joe and jane six pack to digest as it sounds like the kid left fingerprints at the scene of the crime; Case closed. Be we know it's pure bullshit.

    But occams razor might also say that the kid did nothing to cover his tracks and ip's were logged. That was misunderstood and reported as serial numbers. Very plausible too.

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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:08PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:08PM (#724145) Journal

    True, the story doesn't really say what they mean by serial #'s. They could mean IP addresses, MAC addresses (but MAC is strictly LAN isn't it? WANs aren't Ethernet and don't use MACs, and further, the kid might have been behind a NAT), browser fingerprints, or as you say, have no idea themselves what they are reporting.

    I took it to mean a CPU serial number of the sort that Intel started adding to their CPUs beginning with the Pentium III circa 2000. There was a big ruckus at the time, and Intel backed down, a little, but I would not be at all surprised if they quietly reactivated serial numbers a few years later.