Apple has confirmed that its developer website which remained offline for three days was due to a hacking attempt by an unknown “intruder”. The site was taken offline by hackers and in a statement issued to its developer base , the company confirms that personal information from its userbase “might” have been stolen as well. Trouble began when Apple’s developer website and forums suddenly went offline last Thursday and refused to come back online even after three days. There was silence from the company as well regarding the reason for such a long downtime leading to speculations that it might have been due to an attack.
The statement issues by Apple reads thus:
“Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed. However, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue”.
Ever since the hack, Apple decided to take the entire site down and its engineers have been working overtime to overhauling the entire security layer of the website. Apple adds “We are completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database,” They have confirmed that they “expect to have the developer website up again soon.”
This is probably the biggest cyber security related issue that Apple faced in its recent past and questions would be raised as to how secure user data stored in Apple servers really are.
