Apple on Friday told Reuters that a hack by an Australian teen, where he downloaded 90 gigabytes of “secure files” from Apple servers, did not compromise customer data.
An Apple spokesman said the company’s information security personnel “discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement” without commenting further on the specifics of the case.
“We … want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised,” the spokesman said.
A Thursday report about the hack from The Age said customer data had indeed been accessed by a 16-year-old Melbourne boy, whose name has not been made public due his being a juvenile. The teens conducted a series of attacks on Apple’s servers in the course of a year.
The hacker downloaded approximately 90GB of secure files and accessed customer accounts, according to court statements. The teen entered a guilty plea in Children’s Court on Thursday.
The Melbourne teen used VPNs and other anonymity tools in an attempt to avoid being traced. However, Apple’s systems logged the serial numbers of the MacBooks the teen used to gain entry.
The two laptops were seized, and the serial numbers of the devices matched those of the MacBooks used to access the internal Apple systems. Authorities also seized a mobile phone and a hard drive.
Authorities say the downloaded material was all saved into a folder labeled “hacky hack hack.”