Aussie teen breaches Apple’s mainframe

SYDNEY: A schoolboy who “dreamed” of working for Apple hacked the firm’s computer systems, local media reported, although the tech giant said yesterday that no customer data was compromised.

The Children’s Court of Victoria was told the teenager broke into Apple’s mainframe — a large, powerful data processing system — from his home in Melbourne and downloaded 90GB of secure files, The Age reported on Thursday.

The boy, then aged 16, accessed the system multiple times over a year as he was a fan of Apple and had “dreamed of ” working for the United States firm, the newspaper said, citing his lawyer.

Apple said its teams had “discovered the unauthorised access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement”.

The firm, which earlier this month became the first privatesector company to surpass US$1 trillion (RM4.1 trillion) in market value, said it wanted “to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised”.

An international investigation was launched after the discovery involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police, The Age reported.

The newspaper said police raided the boy’s home last year and found hacking files and instructions saved in a folder called “hacky hack hack”.

“Two Apple laptops were seized and the serial numbers matched the serial numbers of the devices that accessed the internal systems,” a prosecutor was reported as saying.

The teen had pleaded guilty and the case is due for sentencing next month.