Apple Developer Website Hacked: Developer Names, Addresses May Have Been Taken

Sunday July 21, 2013 4:01 pm PDT by Jordan Golson

In an email to developers today, Apple revealed that its Developer Center website was breached by unknown hackers and was taken offline last Thursday as a precaution.

The company notes that sensitive personal information was "encrypted and cannot be accessed" but that Apple's engineers "could not rule out the possibility" that developer names, mailing addresses and email addresses may have been accessed.

Apple says it is overhauling its developer systems, updating software and rebuilding the entire developer database. There is no indication of when the site will be back up, other than the company saying it expects to have it up again soon.

Apple Developer Website Update

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

Apple told Macworld that the breached server was not associated with any customer information and that all personal information is encrypted -- additionally, the attackers did not get access to any app code or to any servers where app information is stored.

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Top Rated Comments

WolfSnap

174 months ago

News reporting would go something like this...

Of the Apple hacking, which didn't really affect much, and is actively being resolved:

Apple completely compromised!

Of the Android master key exploit which exposes 900 million phones to malware/viruses and more, and has no chance of ever being resolved:

<chirp><chirp><chirp>

Score: 43 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Snowshiro

174 months ago

I'm not normally one to step up and defend Apple, but in this case, sadly this is how things are now.

Facebook has been hacked, Twitter has been hacked, Sony has been hacked, Zendesk has been hacked, Microsoft has been hacked, Ubuntu has been hacked, numerous government websites have been hacked etc. etc.

It's simply next to impossible these days to guarantee security in the millions of lines of code that constitute modern Operating Systems and the dozens of processes that run on them. Someone will find a vulnerability sooner or later and exploit it. The only thing you can do is make it as hard as possible for them, and store your data in as safe a manner as possible with strong encryption (and hashing for passwords).

This was going to happen sooner or later, and while it looks bad for Apple, it's a fact of life that there are people out there for whom hacking is their job and how they earn their money. The only way to secure your data from hacking, is not to put it on the internet. End of story.

Score: 26 Votes (Like | Disagree)

TheFithBeatle

174 months ago

oh dam

this will hit news stations like a frenzy, android users are gonna gloat

Score: 18 Votes (Like | Disagree)

WhackyNinja

174 months ago

Travel back in Time and stop this NOW!

Fixed point in time it cant be changed! ITS ALL JUST WIBBLY WOBBLY TIMEY WIMEY

Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Zaqfalcon

174 months ago

Do developer names, mailing addresses and email addresses, not constitute sensitive?

Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)

gnasher729

174 months ago

Why didn't you do this as routine maintenance to prevent anything like this from happening to this severity? Sure you can't make it 100% immune from attacks, but you could make the data 98% safe.

It seems you don't have much experience building secure websites. What you do is building security in depth. You make sure nobody can get in, and you make sure there's nothing to see if somebody gets in. You always assume that someone _might_ figure out how to get around one defense, and have a second defense in place. That's what Apple did, and it worked. Most likely the attacker didn't get access to anything, and what there was to access was encrypted.

If you knew of ways to get past one of the defences, you would of course fix it. Somebody got in, which means they used a method that wasn't anticipated and couldn't have been fixed. Because of "security in depth", that breach didn't gain the attacker anything, but now Apple knows what they did and makes the necessary changes. It is quite possible that Apple's security developers have from time to time found possible attacks and quietly fixed them; you wouldn't notice it.

----------

Why didn't these hackers go after the NSA? They already have all Apple Dev Center data and lots more..

That's of course nonsense, and you know that. And if it was true, you wouldn't go after the NSA. You go after someone who can't lock you away for the rest of your sad life without a court case.

this shows that apple is no longer reliable and it may affect stocks greatly.
There goes the public trust...Apple....

Nonsense. There's security in depth in place. Someone got past one defense, was promptly detected, and other defenses stopped him. Exactly how it is supposed to work. Public trust is also based on how a company handles problems: Apple handled it by immediately shutting down the site, which is inconvenient, but the absolutely safe thing to do, and they promptly informed the affected people about what was going on. Others companies would have kept the site running, hoping that nothing else happens. That's the companies you can't trust.

Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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Apple Developer Website Hacked: Developer Names, Addresses May Have Been Taken

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