Apple Explains Reasoning Behind Developer Web Site Outage

Developers trying to access Apple’s developer Web site were in for a surprise last Thursday as the Web site appeared to be down. Apple has Sunday issued an E-mail to developers explaining the reasoning behind the Web site outage, which appears to be the result of an intruder gaining unwarranted access to the site and exploiting information:

The full E-mail below:

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 notes that much of the developers' personal information is encrypted and can’t be accessed; however, other information, such as some E-mail addresses, mailing addresses, and some names may have been compromised in the attack.

In the mean time, the Web site’s outage is a direct result of this attack and Apple is working on updating the security of the Web site. The Web site will be back up and running as soon as Apple gets a chance to have all of their updated security in place.

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