A 16-year old private school student in Australia has pleaded guilty to hacking Apple’s network multiple times, downloading over 90GB of secure data from Apple for an entire year. His excuse? He’s a fan of Apple.
The Melbourne teenager admitted to hacking Apple’s network multiple times from his suburban home using tools stored in a folder named as “Hacky hack hack”, local media The Age reported.
The 90-gigabyte data trove included secure files and customer accounts. The teenager also accessed customer accounts without exposing his identity by using a virtual private network (VPN), the report said.
The teenager accessed Apple’s internal systems to retrieve highly-secured ‘authorised keys’ for logging into customer accounts. The teenager then bragged about his feats through WhatsApp, making him a well-known figure in the international hacking community.
Once Apple became aware of the incident, it reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who, in turn, referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
The teenager’s name has been withheld due to his present status as a juvenile offender. The AFP raided the teenager’s family home to discover two laptops, a hard drive and a mobile phone that matched the details of the intrusion reported by Apple.
Upon discovery and interrogation, the teenager said he was a huge “fan” of the company and went so far as stating Apple was his “dream job”.
Sentencing won’t take place until next month due to the “complexity” of the case, which was heard by the Children’s Court on Thursday, August 16.
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