A 16-year-old boy from Australia has admitted to hacking into Apple’s network and downloading internal files.
According to The Age newspaper, the Australian teen hacked into Apple’s mainframe because he admired the company and hoped to work there in the future.
“At Apple, we vigilantly protect our networks and have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats,” said Apple in a statement.
“In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorised access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement.”
“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.”
Apple has denied that customers were affected, despite the teenage hacker downloading 90GB of secure files and accessing customer accounts.
The teen used WhatsApp messages to boast to his friends of the hacking.
For legal reasons, the boy’s name has not been made public. He will be sentenced on 20 September.
A privacy expert from the University of Melbourne’s school of computing and information systems, Dr Suelette Dreyfus, said the boy should not receive a punitive sentence.
“I have researched a number of teen hacker cases internationally,” said Dreyfus.
“Almost all these teens grew out of the technology boundary-pushing of their youth, and then went on to live useful lives and contributing to society. Putting them in prison is often a waste of that potential.”
“Young people often make mistakes when they are exploring and rule-breaking especially online – including boasting about their exploits. It’s not right, but for tech teens, it can be a part of growing up … there’s usually a really worried teen and family at the end of this sort of court case.”
Earlier this month, Apple became the world’s first trillion-dollar company.
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