Apple has come clean about the reason why developers trying to access the company’s developer Web site experienced a site outage late last week.
On Sunday, Apple confirmed via email to developers that an intruder gaining unwarranted access to the site and exploited information.
“Last Thursday,” Apple explained in the message, “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,” the note concludes, “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.”
Putting minds at ease, Apple says much of the developers’ personal information is encrypted and can’t be accessed.
In response to this latest unfortunate incident, Apple is working on updating the security of the Web site.
