An Australian teenager with a love of Apple decided to hack his favourite company and is now facing criminal charges.
The files were stored in a folder on his laptop labelled ‘hacky hack hack’.
Apple has come out and said that no user data was compromised in the attacks.
“We … want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised,” a spokeperson told Reuters.
The tech giant called in the FBI after noticing the attacks were happening.
The FBI then passed on the allegations to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). The AFP carried out a search on the teen’s home last year and seized two Apple laptops, a mobile phone and a hard drive, which all matched the serial numbers and IP addresses that had intruded into the organisation.
How did the teen carry out the Apple hacks?
When the AFP searched the teenager’s devices, the agency found the laptop's boosted hacking software. This software was used to access authorised keys, which grant log-in access to the Apple mainframe.
The AFP reported that the teen used WhatsApp to boast about his misadventures to others.
According to The Age, the teenager’s lawyer said he hacked Apple because he was such a fan of the company.
Following his hacks, he has become so well known in the international hacking community that even mentioning the case in detail could expose him to risk.
The teen pleaded guilty to the charges, however, he will not be sentenced until next month due to complexities surrounding the case.
Teenager hackers is a sub-category all on its own. Last year, Adam Mudd was jailed for two years after creating a computer hacking business when he was 16. After selling this software to cyber criminals, around 1.7 million attacks were carried out on websites such as Minecraft, Xbox Live and Microsoft.
You can’t fault them for their skills and talent, but you can for the way they use them. That’s why the UK’s National Crime Agency now has a ‘rehab’ course for teen hackers which discusses what is illegal online and encourages the teens to use their skills in the security industry.
