Apple says developer website hacked

Apple has said that its Developer portal has been hacked and that some information about its 275,000 registered third-party developers who use it may have been stolen, The Guardian reported.

The portal at developer.apple.com had been offline since Thursday without explanation, raising speculation among developers first that it had suffered a disastrous database crash, and then that it had been hacked.


A Turkish security research, Ibrahim Balic, claims that he was behind the "hack" but insisted that his intention was to demonstrate that Apple's system was leaking user information. He posted a video on Youtube which appears to show that the site was vulnerable to an attack, but adding "I have reported all the bugs I found to the company and waited for approval." A screenshot in the video showed a bug filed on 19 July - the same day the site was taken down - saying "Data leaks user information. I think you should fix it as soon as possible."

The video appears to show developer names and IDs. The Guardian is trying to establish whether they are those of registered developers.