UPDATED 22:52 EST / AUGUST 16 2018

INFRA

Australian teen accused of hacking and stealing data from Apple

A teen in Melbourne, Australia, has appeared before a court for allegedly hacking Apple Inc. and stealing 90 gigabytes of data from its corporate server.

Fairfax Media reported today that the teen, unnamed because of Australian law, appeared before the Children’s Court of Victoria Thursday local time on unspecified criminal charges relating to his hacking of the iPhone maker in 2017.

The report claimed that the Australian Federal Police, Australia’s version of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, executed a search warrant on the teen’s home last year. The agency seized two Apple laptops with serial numbers matching the serial numbers of the devices that accessed Apple’s internal systems along with a mobile phone and hard drive.

The prosecutor in the case claimed that the AFP found software that had enabled the hacking installed on the teen’s laptop, along with “authorized keys” that gave him access to Apple’s backend systems.

As it turns out, the teen using Apple computers to hack Apple itself is not ironic. The barrister defending the teen told the court that the accused was a massive Apple fan and “dreamed of” working for Apple.

The teen is claimed to have developed multiple backdoors and managed to evade detection until the police raid found the stolen files along with hacking instructions in a folder helpfully named “hacky hack hack.” It’s not clear what data was stolen, only that it was “sensitive” in its nature.

This is not the first time Apple has been hacked. Widespread coverage was given to a number of people who hacked iCloud accounts and shared nude pictures of celebrities back in 2015.

The unnamed teen has pleaded guilty and is due to appear before the Children’s Court in September for sentencing.

Photo: Google Maps

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