Strange that major tech sites haven’t picked up on this much sooner. The culprit is not one of the company’s many competitors in the smartphone business, but a 16-year old high school student from Melbourne, Australia.

Like any obsessed fan of celebrities, this 16-year old kid from Australia, whose name is withheld by authorities as he’s still a minor, has broken into Apple’s home and rummaged through Apple’s stuff, not once but on several occasions. Plus, what’s embarrassing is that his activity has been going on for over a year. The culprit stated that he’s a big fan of Apple and wishes to work there someday.

If Apple appreciates his talent, he might work there someday but from the look of things, he’d still get a slap on the wrist this coming 20^th of September at an Australian children’s court. Aside from legal reasons stemming from the boy’s age, his identity is being kept confidential for his own personal security as others my want to tap his talents.

The young man is now well-known within the international hacking community for this incident and that the methods he used cannot be mentioned in detail.

Seized from the student were two Apple laptops, a mobile phone and a hard drive. His IP address and laptop serial numbers were identified as matching those used in the hacking. Found in the devices were several hacking tools used in the attack.

For over a year, according to investigators, the teenager has been flawlessly accessing Apple’s files and saving everything in an obviously named folder “hacky hack hack”.

Apple’s administrators finally noticed his presence and reported him to the FBI who traced him to Australia where his case was passed to the Australian Federal Police. Apple, in a bid to downplay the incident has reported that no sensitive customer data has been stolen.

At Apple, we vigilantly protect our networks and have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats… In this case, our teams 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.

–Apple statement to Reuters

Contrary to Apple’s statement, the files allegedly contain Apple internal files and some customer account information which the teenager managed to access; and that he may have shared some of the information to his peers through WhatsApp.

This incident should serve as a lesson, even to large companies like Apple that kids shouldn’t be underestimated; and if their vaunted unbreakable security can be breached by admiring teenagers, malicious adults can.

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