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Apple Computers Hacked

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Apple Computers Were Hacked By Same Hackers Who Targeted Facebook: Reuters

Apple Inc. has recently admitted to have been attacked on a small scale basis by unknown hackers who infected the machines of their employees. The company made this unexpected disclosure after the recent cyber attacks on social networking giant Facebook came into the limelight and mentioned that the attack was the largest known attack on Apple machines. However, the company was quick to clarify that the only a small fraction of their machines were infected and that they had isolated those infected machines immediately.

Apple Computers Hacked

Apple Computers Hacked

The attacks occurred after some employees of the firm visited a website which caters to software developers. The site has been identified as an online forum for iPhone developers’ viz. www.iphonedevsdk.com which was infected with a malware which was loaded on to the machines of the people who visited the site. The malware was designed so as to exploit a hitherto unknown security vulnerability in the Java plug in developed by Oracle corp. for Mac computers which means that this was done with an intent of infecting these devices specifically. The interesting fact is that the same malware was used by some hackers a few days back to attack Facebook, as the company revealed on Friday. Moreover, the company also mentioned that the same malware was used to attack Mac computers of other companies while not specifying the extent of the attacks. Furthermore, Twitter has announced that it faced a similar assault on February 1 and that hackers had stolen personal info of about 250,000 users  and was part of a similar series of attacks.

These revelations have raised doubts about these attacks being state sponsored by the Chinese government and persons close to these investigations feel that Chinese hackers could be responsible for these attacks, though there is no official evidence for the same. This is not the first time that the Chinese are facing such allegations.

Investigations have begun and as of now there has been not any breakthrough regarding the nature of the attacks and what type of data had been stolen or not though Apple has denied any theft of data as such from their company. Apple is assisting the authorities in these investigations completely to get to the culprits.

Some cyber security firms are of the opinion that many companies and corporations in the U.S. suffer extensive cyber espionage at the hands of Chinese military who could be the perpetrators of these attacks. White House officials have commented that the government has repeatedly raised the issue of cyber espionage with the Chinese government.

Since the malware was designed to exploit the Java vulnerability so people who have their Java plug-ins enabled still are at a risk and this applies to smartphones and even Windows based devices. Apple has meanwhile released a patch for OS X users and will be coming up with software that will let know the users of any infection with malware.

Well, this is the first time such a large scale attack on Mac computers has been observed. So Mac users and smartphone users will have to stay cautious of malicious software till the company fixes this problem effectively.



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