Last Thursday, Apple developer website was offline for several hours. Everyone assumed that the company would be upgrading some features of the website, so no one paid much attention.
But the reality is far from the speculation of the day. Apple 's Developer Center was offline due to a security breach, according to an email the company sent to developers today. The email was first circulated on Twitter by developers, so the news is no longer a secret.
The email stated:
Apple Developer Website Update
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.
So in a nutshell
Last Thursday, an attacker attempted to obtain the personal information of our registered developers from our website. Sensitive personal information is encrypted, however, we are unable to rule out the possibility that some developer names and email addresses have been leaked. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you about the issue. We took the website down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by the downtime.
