Apple said on Sunday that its developers website was taken down after being hacked last week, and warned developers that while data was encrypted, personal information may have been stolen by the attackers.
The following email was sent to developers on Sunday.
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.
Apple’s developers site is a dedicated site offering technical resources for third-party software developers designing apps for Mac OS and iOS, and also hosts community forums.
News of the attack on Apple wasn’t the only hack making headlines over the weekend.
UbuntuForums.com, a large community site operated by Canonical Ltd., the company behind the open source Linux OS Ubuntu, was defaced at some point on Saturday, but the attacker(s) went a step further and accessed the user database. The site boasts over 1.8 million registered members.
According to Canonical, attackers obtained every user’s local username, password, and email address from Ubuntu Forums database. Other services, including Ubuntu One, Launchpad and other Ubuntu/Canonical services were NOT affected by the breach, the company said.
The UbuntuForums.com site remains offline as of 6:30AM ET on Monday.