Australian Teen, Who Wanted to Work for Apple, Hacked Their System

A teenager hacked into Apple’s core secure system in the hope to impress the company and get a job, landed up in jail.

The 17-year-old school student has also confessed that he with the help of his friend another teenager from Melbourne, hacked into the Apple’s mainframe in December 2015 and again in early 2017 and downloaded internal documents and data.

The Adelaide based boy, also said he used his high-level expertise in the information technology to create false digital credentials and convinced Apple’s server into thinking that he was a company employee.

The actions of the self-proclaimed Apple fanboy were reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation who then contacted the Australian Federal Police (AFP), who arrested the two teens.

The boy’s lawyer Mark Twiggs defending his client told the court that his client was not aware of the seriousness of his actions at the time as he thought the company might offer him a job.

Twiggs said, “This started when my client was 13 years of age, a very young age. He has no idea about the seriousness of the offence and hoped that when it was discovered he might gain employment at this company”.

The lawyer also quoted a similar incident that happened somewhere in Europe in which the hacker ended up getting a job in the Apple Inc. Twiggs also said that the iPhone-maker did not incur any financial or intellectual loss because of the hack.

The court also declared that Apple Inc. was not affected financially or intellectually and data of the customers were also not compromised from the hack.

The tech giant issued a statement in relation to the case and revised its commitment to the data security of its customers.

The statement said, “At Apple, we vigilantly protect our networks and we have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats round the clock. In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorized access, they first contained it and then reported the whole incident to law enforcement”.

The statement also added, “We regard the data security of our users which is one of our greatest responsibilities and we want to assure our customers that during this incident at no point was their personal data compromised”.

The Adelaide Youth Court finds the boy guilty in the multiple computer hacking charges. Magistrate David White has now placed him on a $500 bond to be on good behaviour for nine months.