‘Hacky Hack Hack!’ Australian teen facing charges over Apple’s internal network and data breach

Hacky Hack Hack: The Age reports that the teen gained access to Apple’s internal network at various instances over the year. He was summoned to a Melbourne court on Thursday.

An Australian teen whose name has been withheld is facing charges by authorities over Apple’s internal network and data breach. The Age reports that the teen gained access to Apple’s internal network at various instances over the year. He was summoned to a Melbourne court on Thursday. Apple caught him and further escalated the matter over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). FBI then helped the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to track down the teen.

The teen reportedly downloaded 90GB of files and customers accounts that were secure, that too without revealing his identity. Australian Federal Police raided the teen’s family home and confiscated two laptops, a mobile phone and a hard drive. Their model numbers matched with those caught by Apple. The downloaded, sensitive data was stored in a folder named “Hacky Hack Hack.” He further boasted of his activities on Facebook-owned instant messenger WhatsApp.

According to a news agency Agence France-Presse, Apple’s spokesperson said that the company’s information security personnel “discovered the unauthorised access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement” without revealing too many details. Both AFP and Melbourne court declined to comment since the matter is still in court. The teenager would be sentenced next month on September 20, 2018.

This comes months after Apple’s iOS source code was leaked and posted online, which could cause a security issue and make devices running on iOS vulnerable to a potential security threat. The source code for iOS 9 labelled iBoot was shared on Github. Apple got the code taken down from Github. Apple iOS code is proprietary and not open-source.