Sentencing set for Australian teen accused of hacking Apple's servers

By Stephen Silver

The then-16-year-old, who plead guilty to taking about a terabyte of information from Apple's systems, will be sentenced September 27.

According to Bloomberg News, the defendant faces two charges, one of which carries a maximum sentence of two years, while the other of one year.

Because he was a minor at the time of the alleged crime, the defendant, who is from Melbourne, has not been named.

As first reported in mid-August the hacker, described as an Apple fan who dreamed of one day working for the company, used an authorized key to download the files and placed them in a folder he titled "hacky hack hack."

The hacks reportedly took place over the course of more than two years, and entailed the defendant and an accomplice having "modified and copied a large volume of data that was sensitive both from a privacy and commercial point of view." Apple discovered the breach and informed the FBI, who in turn briefed Australian law enforcement authorities.

Apple said soon afterward that no customer data was compromised. "In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement," the company said in a statement at the time.

The prosecutor said the hacker and his accomplice "did not remain commercially disinterested," although it was also noted that the accused hacker did not make any effort to publicize his crime. Indeed, the story stayed completely out of the media until news of the defendant's guilty plea in August.