The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has finally decided to take stringent action against a teenager who has managed to hack into the mainframe network of Apple Inc, several times in the past year and succeeded in downloading over 90GB of data along with the data access to several customer accounts.
Sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders say that the motive of the 16-year-old boy from Melbourne was to just break into the Apple servers in order to prove his hacking talent to the Technology giant- all in a hope to secure a job iPhone maker’s company.
However, intercepting digital assets in an unlawful way is now an internationally recognized crime and so FBI has decided to import the teenager to the American soil for prosecution.
It’s said that the Australian lad managed to access over 90 gigabytes of secure files in the past 14 months. And Apple security analysts could only find out the details of the intrusion in June this year. Upon discovery, they informed the incident details to FBI which referred the matter to Australia Federal Police (AFP) which managed to track down the hacker in just 15 days.
An Apple representative in Australia pressed charges against the teenager for unlawful digital invasion on Apple’s IT assets and the teenager was found guilty.
Apart from what the teenager is going to suffer as per the Australian law, FBI plans to press fresh charges against the boy for breaking into the network of a US company- which has/could tarnish the integrity and image of the nation on a global platform.
On the day of his arrest, the police found two laptops, a mobile phone, and a hard drive having the downloaded documents in a folder named ‘Hack Hack Hack’. A source from AFP says that the boy updated the details of the hacking activity from time to time to his friends on WhatsApp.
Nevertheless, since the attack was not state funded and the motive was not malicious, some kind of laxity in the punishment pronouncement can be expected against the kid.
Note 1- As the boy is a juvenile offender; his name has been withheld.
Note 2-After hearing the Melbourne court’s decision on the boy on Sept 20 this year, FBI is said to decide on its next step against the teen.
