A teenager from Melbourne, Australia is in court facing charges for repeatedly breaking into Apple's secure computer network... because he was such a fan of the company.
The teen, who cannot be named for legal reasons, broke into Apple's mainframe from his suburban home on multiple occasions over a year because he was such a fan of the company, according to his lawyer.The Children's Court heard on Thursday that he had downloaded 90gb of secure files and accessed customer accounts.
Not a lot of details, of course, but this stands out:
Further analysis found that the schoolboy successfully accessed "authorised keys" as part of his offending.Authorised keys grant log-in access to users and are said to be extremely secure.He then used Whatsapp to communicate his offending to others.
No word yet on what was actually compromised, if anything, and how that may or may not affect users.
That someone could get into Apple's secure systems isn't good. That Apple discovered the intrusion and the FBI and AFP were able to apprehend the attacker is good. Hopefully, it results in significant security hardening on Apple's end.
The suspect, apparently, dreamt of working at Apple. While movies get made about hackers getting hired, there are no doubt safer ways to go about it. The kind of ways that likely won't see you thrown in jail first.
