Teen says he hacked Apple to impress them.
Apple pushes back, denies user data was compromised during the break-in
A 16-year-old Apple fanboy repeatedly hacked into the company’s computer systems over the course of a year because he hoped to work for the tech giant one day, a court in Melbourne heard this week.
The teen, who reportedly told police he “dreamed of” working for the Silicon Valley tech giant and was not named because of his age, pleaded guilty in children’s court Thursday. The court heard that the teen downloaded 90 GB of secure files and accessed customer accounts, according to the Age, an Australian newspaper.
But Apple is pushing back against the assertion that customer data was accessed.
“We regard the data security of our users as one of our greatest responsibilities and want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised,” a spokesman told this news organization Friday.
“In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement,” the spokesman said, but would not elaborate. The company notified the FBI, which contacted the Australian Federal Police.
The Age reported that a raid on the teen’s home uncovered files in a folder titled “hacky hack hack.” The police seized two Apple laptops, a mobile phone and a hard drive. Prosecutors said serial numbers on the laptops matched the ones that accessed Apple’s systems, and so did the teen’s IP address.
The teen also reportedly bragged about his exploits on WhatsApp, and his lawyer told the court that his client has become so famous in the international hacking community that talking about the case in detail could put him at risk. Apparently because of that and other complexities in the case, the teen is scheduled to be sentenced next month.