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Apple’s developer centre is currently offline and a message warns visitors that an attempt was made to access secure personal information of registered developers.
However, a Turkish security researcher now claims that he was responsible for the violation, which he claims has exposed flaws in Apple’s system.
“Last Thursday [July 18th], 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,” read Apple’s message on the official website.
As a consequence of this action, the site was taken offline on July 18th.
Apple is currently undergoing a complete overhaul of its developer systems, updating the server software and rebuilding the entire database.
There are some 275,000 registered developers on Apple’s Developer Center, and it is possible that data from users has been stolen.
Contrary to Apple’s warning about the hacking attempt, security researcher Ibrahim Balic claims he was behind the intrusion and has posted YouTube video explaining that the site was vulnerable to attack.
“I have reported all the bugs I found to the company and waited for approval,” he said in the video, while a screenshot showed a bug filed on July 19th – the same time period that the site was taken down – adding “Data leaks user information. I think you should fix it as soon as possible.”
The video appears to show developer names and IDs. However, several email addresses reportedly belong to criticised services, including Demon, Freeserve and Mindspring.
Apple’s developer portal allows developers to download new versions of Mac OS X and iOS 7 betas, boot up new devices so they can run the beta software and access forums to discuss issues.
Balic has explained his position to some news outlets. Apple is yet to respond to this turn of events.
