Apple Developer Portal Breach Credited To Security Researcher

If you've been wondering why Apple's Developer portal was down for a few days, blame it on a security breach. Apple announced yesterday that their dev center was hacked into, but no personal information was accessed, thankfully. So who's behind the intrusion? A security researcher is taking the credit.

Independent security researcher Ibrahim Balic claims that his effort to breach into the developer portal was not intended to be malicious at all, and he ended up reporting all of the vulnerabilities that he found to Apple. Balic found 13 bugs in total, and was even able to access user details, but he only accessed 73 Apple employees just to prove to the company about the vulnerability.

Balic claims he comes in peace and even contacted Apple to make sure he wasn't putting them through any difficulty. He says that he hasn't published or used any of the information that he was able to access, but some users have reported getting password reset notifications after a possible breach to their accounts.

Apple's Developer portal has been down for four days now, and it's still showing that it's down right now. There's no word on when we might expect it to come back to full throttle, but most likely in the next day or two. While this is certainly an inconvenience for developers, this could pose an even greater problem for beta software versions.

We could see a delay on beta releases for both iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks. It seems Apple is focusing on getting their Developer portal back up and running before anything else, which means it may take longer for beta versions to release. However, we still have plenty of time before Apple's proposed fall release of iOS 7.

SOURCE: Ibrahim Balic (TechCrunch)