Apple Developer Center Yanked Offline After Suffering Security Breach

Apple’s Developer Center is still unavailable after being breached by a hacker last Thursday. Apparently the intruder attempted to secure personal information about registered developers from the developer website. Sensitive personal information such as developers’ names, mailing addresses, and email addresses may have been accessed.

The portal has been offline for six days now while Apple attempts to rectify the situation. Notice was just delivered to developers saying the following:

“We apologize for the significant inconvenience caused by our developer website downtime. We’ve been working around the clock to overhaul our developer systems, update our server software, and rebuild our entire database. While we complete the work to bring our systems back online, we want to share the latest with you.

We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We’ll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we’ve created a status page to display the availability of our systems.

If your program membership is set to expire during this period, it will be extended and your app will remain on the App Store. If you have any other concerns about your account, please contact us.

Thank you for your continued patience.”

According to Wired.com, “The purported “hacker,” it turns out, was a well-meaning independent security researcher. Even though his actions were supposedly benevolent, the researcher could be in hot water if Apple decides to take legal action.”

As an iPad app developer it is frustrating being directly effected by the Dev Center being down. The pace of work has slowed to a crawl and this has been highly detrimental to the stability of the mobile ecosystem.

Whether well intentioned or not this hacker has done a huge disservice to the San Francisco iPhone app developer community by impairing the tools this industry depends upon to deliver mobile software services. Hats off to Apple for acting to resolve the security holes. Rest assured their engineers are working around the clock to get the developer portal back up and running again. We’ll continue to follow this story closely.