Apple Developer Website Hacked

It seems that Apple’s developer website was hacked, resulting in some significant downtime along the way throughout the past week. I am quite sure that there was some suspicion of that among those who used the website, but nothing official was shared – at least not until today, when Apple shared with the world in an email to registered developers (you can view the screenshot as seen above), touting that sensitive emails, names as well as physical addresses could very well have been compromised. When Apple realized that the repercussions would be a whole lot more far reaching, they decided with the bold move of taking down the website last Thursday in order to prevent any most damage.

The email that Apple sent out read as follows, “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. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.”

This is not the first time that something like this happened, as the previous occurrence involved the company’s iOS 7 beta roll out earlier this June. Back then, the reason for the downtime and outage was definitely not as “harmful” as in this case.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Apple
Tags: Hacking