According to a report by Motherboard, the group self identified as ‘Turkish Crime Family’, allegedly having access to iCloud and Apple accounts, demanded $75,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another increasingly popular crypto-currency, or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in exchange for deleting the alleged cache of data.
The hackers seems to have given Motherboard quite the story, and quite a bit of access; providing screenshots of alleged emails between the group and members of Apple’s security team. One also gave Motherboard access to an email account allegedly used to communicate with Apple.
The hackers also uploaded a YouTube video of them allegedly logging into some of the stolen accounts. The hacker appears to access an elderly woman’s iCloud account, which includes backed-up photos, and the ability to remotely wipe the device.
While we can’t independently verify any of those claims or the video, they do seem to be enjoying the spotlight by multiple media reports, as seen on their twitter account. They’ve also pinned their threats clearly.
200 Million iCloud accounts will be factory reset on April 7 2017
— Turkish Crime Family (@turkcrimefamily) March 21, 2017
If Apple does not figure out a way to stop us they'll be facing serious server issues and customer complaints
— Turkish Crime Family (@turkcrimefamily) March 23, 2017
According to one of the emails in the accessed account, the hackers claim to have access to over 300 million Apple email accounts, including those use @icloud and @me domains. However, Motherboard has doubts about the story due to inconsistency – one of the hackers then claimed they had 559 million accounts in all. The hackers did not provide Motherboard with any of the supposedly stolen iCloud accounts to verify this claim. Apparently this number is increasing.
The number of Apple credentials have increased from 519m to 627m, we are convinced it will keep growing until 7 April 2017
— Turkish Crime Family (@turkcrimefamily) March 22, 2017
Apart from that, the hackers seems to be quite unhappy about some of the media reports, noting that false information has been fed.
https://twitter.com/turkcrimefamily/status/844784025629687810
Apparently Motherboard isn’t the only media who got contacted; it appears the hackers have approached multiple media outlets. According to Motherboard, this may be in an attempt to put pressure on Apple; hackers sometimes feed information to reporters in order to help extortion efforts.
Apple did not respond to Motherboard’s multiple requests for comment.
This story was originally published on Motherboard. While we made minor changes for clarity to keep the story concise, we recommend you the head over to Motherboard’s site to read more about their communication with the hackers as well as the email exchange.
