Are Apple developers on the hacker hit list?

Note: this post is condensed from an article written for Digital New Asia.

Apple's developer website for its Mac, iPhone and iPad products was taken offline about two weeks ago; shortly afterwards, Apple released a statement saying that the site had been suffered an intrusion.

Soon after, a grey hat Turkish security researcher, Ibrahim Balic, in London claimed responsibility for the intrusion in a video posted on his YouTube channel, in which he claimed that he had filed bug reports prior to the takedown of the website.

Although there has been no further comments or statements from Apple about Balic's claim, Apple does seem to be taking the occurrence seriously and is currently still working restoring their web services.

Now the issue is — why are developers, particularly iOS developers, being targeted now more than ever? The intrusion on the developer site, though allegedly done with benign intent, brings greater attention to the importance of securing developer accounts, and the potential consequences if such accounts are compromised and misused.

This is in light of an attack earlier this year on the popular iOS Mobile developers' forum iPhoneDevSDK, which successfully garnered victims from the big tech companies, like Apple, Facebook and Twitter and so on.

Are Apple developers on the hacker hit list? | F-Secure Weblog