This Hacker Gets No Prison Time After His Extortion Attempt Targeting Apple

Back in 2017, a man and his co-conspirators threated to hack the iCloud accounts of 250 million iPhone and iPad users and factory reset the devices.

The man behind this extortion attempt, Kerem Albayrak, was sentenced recently to a suspended jail term lasting for two years, a half-year electronic curfew, and 300 hours of unpaid work. According to NCA (UK National Crime Agency), Albayrak represents the Turkish Crime Family, a hacker group.

He was the one who personally contacted Apple announcing the threat and asked for an amount of ransom, as well as letting the press knows about the attack.

According to NCA, the very first contact attempt was made on the 12^th of March 2017 when the hacker sent an email to the security team of Apple claiming that he had breached into several iCloud accounts and he would sell the data. He asked for one thousand iTunes gift cards, which were worth $100 each, or $75,000 in cryptocurrency to delete all the data.

A week after the email was sent, he uploaded a video on YouTube showing him accessing a random iCloud account.

On the 21^st of March, Albaryak heightened the ransom to $100,000 and threated to breach 250 million accounts, factory reset the devices, as well as reset all users’ passwords.

Apple had no intention to pay the ransom and had contacted the authority right after that. As the hacker group did not get what they wanted, the number of supposedly hacked iCloud accounts increased.

Albaryak might have succeeded in hacking iClound accounts but he had done a terrible job hiding his trail. He was taken into custody on the 28^th of March, 2017 by the UK police. According to the NCA, they found nothing indicated that he had ever managed to hack an iCloud account.

In 2017, Apple said that Albaryak could only access the iCloud which users used the same passwords with other accounts online. And the leak was from other sites, not Apple’s system itself.