Apple has announced that its developer website, which has experienced some significant downtime this past week, has been hacked, leaving many developer's personal information vulnerable.
The company released a statement via an e-mail to registered developers saying that sensitive e-mails, names and physical addresses could have been compromised. The website was taken down on Thursday to prevent any further threats while Apple sorts out the problem.
In the e-mail to developers the company wrote: "Last Thursday, 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, 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."
According to Venture Beat, the iCloud and iTunes have over 300 million accounts, all with credit card information accompanying them. This makes Apple's developer's website a tempting target for hackers.
The last time Apple's developer website went down was in early June when there was a rush of people trying to download the company's iOS 7 beta release. This week's shutdown, however, comes after a much more nefarious cause.
For now, those who are worried about their information being at risk should take all the necessary security steps laid out by the company. As of now, the front page of the site is currently live but developers will have trouble logging into the site. A message will appear that reads: "In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, 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."
