Tag: Apple
22. August 2018
A 16-year-old boy from Melbourne, Australia broke into Apple‘s internal computer systems and downloaded 90GB of data, as reported by Australian newspaper The Age. The teenager acquired possession of “authorised keys“ and had access to Apple’s network for approximately a year.
Last year Apple reported the incident to the FBI who then pointed it out to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). They found the sensitive documents in a computer folder named “hacky hack hack“. Apple succeeded to keep this incident out of media until the court proceedings last week.
The 16-year-old boy has pleaded guilty. According to his lawyer, the teenager broke into the network because he is a huge apple fan who wants to work for the company in the future. A verdict is expected at the end of September.
Apple is now trying to reassure its customers. According to a spokesman of the company, no personal data was compromised.
5. March 2018
Apple backs down: The Chinese government has demanded that Apple no longer outsource control of Chinese users data to US-based servers, but hand them over to a Chinese company.
This is likely to give Chinese authorities access to the personal data of Chinese users.
Apple informed the users in the passed weeks. Users of Apples service iCloud were informed, that their data is not longer stored on servers in the USA. Since February 28th, is Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD) the server provider for the data of Chinese users. GCBD is a state-controlled internet company based in Guizhou Province in southern China.
Affected are iCloud users with a Chinese Apple-ID.
The measure is based on new Chinese cybersecurity law, that is in place since last year. According to the new law, personal data of Chinese users fall under Chinese law and not, like before, under the law, the provider falls under.
For the diffraction under the Chinese law, Apple is heavily criticized.
29. September 2016
Forbes just released an article saying that Apple invited some of the best hackers to its headquarter in Cupertino.
Among them:
- the 19-year-old teenage prodigy who was the first to jailbreak an iPhone 7, and therefore now being a world-renowned iOS hacker as well as an
- ex-NSA employee who has repeatedly found security lacks concerning Mac OS X Luca Todesco.
The meeting should have been secret and kept confidential, but unfortunately some details leaked. So for example that Apple plans to brief them on the launch of its bug bounty program. The hackers will be rewarded with up to $200,000 in case they can provide Apple with information on vulnerabilities about its laptops and phones. Furthermore, the mentioned program is expected to be put into effect before the end of the month due to the fact that this has been promised at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas last months. Nevertheless, Apple pursues an invite-only list-strategy in order to get quality over quantity.
29. April 2016
The U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously on Wednesday about the Email Privacy Bill. The bill aims at updating the current Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) from 1986. Under the ECPA, U.S. Authorities can access email communications directly from service providers with just a subpoena, if data is more than 180 old. However, under the new Email Privacy Act, they will need furthermore a warrant to access emails or other electronic communications no matter how old they are.
Currently, access to electronic communications from U.S. authorities is being subject to debate at an international level. Specially, after some weeks ago the FBI requested Apple to develop a software that allows to extract data from an iPhone device that belonged to the San Bernardino terrorist.
The Email Privacy Bill will have to be voted by the Senate, but the position of the upper chamber towards the bill is still not clear.
