Apple Developer Website Hacked!

In an unprecedented absence from the world, the Apple developer website (developer.apple.com) is going on a week of being offline to developers and the chatter is starting to come to a rumble as anxious apple developers await the re-opening of the portal that breathes life into many of their apps.

It all started sometime last week when the developer website suddenly became inaccessible to tens of thousands of app developers around the world. I myself was in the middle of creating some new certificates when I noticed something had gone wrong. The official statement released by Apple over the weekend said there was a breach in some developers information - but not everyone was effected. Because of the security flaw found, they are rewriting much of the developer console and website as we knew it. The said they are "working around the clock" to fix the situation.

What sort of breach in security could warrant this sort of downtime? We will likely never know how far the hackers got or what caused it, but meanwhile developers can't create new app ID's, provisioning profiles, and just about anything else Apple developer related during this outage. In a sense - most Apple developer production releases have ground to a halt over it all.

Ironically, the iTunes connect website is running fine so if you have an app update or something that doesn't require new certificates, ID's, or profiles you can use it to deliver the goods out - but my guess is review times are a little longer than usual because they likely have "all hands on deck" for the new developer portal release.

So we all sit and wait for the gates to open back up and for Apple to assure us that nothing personal was leaked out, or worse that iOS and Apple software in general is still as secure as everyone has banked on (including recently the US military) for years.