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Teen Allegedly Hacked Into Apple’s Network, Got Caught With ‘Hacky Hack Hack’ Folder

Australian police tracked down the teen after Apple detected the intrusion and alerted the FBI.

An Australian teen has been arrested and charged for hacking into Apple’s internal network and downloading some internal data.

The teen, whose name has not been revealed by the authorities or Australian media, appeared in court in Melbourne on Thursday. He accessed Apple’s internal network multiple times over a year, according to The Age.

It’s unclear whether the data he accessed was particularly sensitive. Apple caught the teen and alerted the FBI, which in turn worked with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to track down the hacker. Authorities seized two laptops, a phone, and a hard drive. They found a folder on one of his computers titled “Hacky Hack Hack,” according to reports.

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Apple said in an emailed statement that the company "discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement."

"We regard the data security of our users as one of our greatest responsibilities and want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised," the statement read.

The AFP declined to comment.

This arrest comes months after someone posted highly sensitive iPhone source code online on GitHub. In that case, the original leaker was an intern who shared the source code for iBoot, a core component of iOS that loads the operating system when the phone turns on, with his friends. Eventually, his friends shared it to one person too many and lost control of it, as Motherboard reported at the time.

This story as been updated to include Apple and the AFP's responses.

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