Apple admits its developer site was hacked last week

If you write software for OS X and iOS, you might be wondering why Apple suddenly took its developer site offline late last week. The answer, it turns out, is that it was the victim of a pretty severe hacking attack.

The company says that the site, which is now back up, was taken down on Thursday because “an intruder attempted to secure personal information” from some registered developers.

While Apple doesn’t give any details on whether the intruder managed to secure any names, email address or mailing addresses, it does say that the information was encrypted.

It was also quick to add that the details of ordinary iTunes users would have been completely unaffected. “The website that was breached is not associated with any customer information,” Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr said. “Additionally, customer information is securely encrypted.”

In an email to developers meanwhile, the Cupertino-based giant added that it would be “completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database”.

While the company faced some flak for taking three days to tell developers what had happened, it says that it did so because it was trying to figure out what data had been exposed.

A TechCrunch commenter meanwhile says that he managed to find a bug on the Apple developer site which gave him access to users details, among other things.

The man, who calls himself a “security researcher”, says he notified Apple about the bug immediately and believes that his notification may have caused the site to shut down.