Turkish Crime Family hacker group threatens to wipe 200 million iCloud accounts unless Apple pays ransom
HACKERS who claim to have control of at least 200 million iCloud accounts have issued a public demand to Apple: pay ransom or we wipe them all.
The hacking group calling itself the Turkish Crime Family has provided video evidence of its claims to the tech site Motherboard, with a demand to Apple that it pay the ransom or face the consequences.
The hackers have listed the price of the ransom as either $A100,000 ransom in Bitcoin or US$A130,000 in iTunes gift cards.
While the demands seem both outlandish and alarming, Motherboard confirms it has seen screenshots of emails appearing to be communications between the hackers and Apple’s security team.
Apple has not commented on the report.
Without confirmation from Apple, it is difficult to verify the claims of the hackers.
There are also some discrepancies in their story. One account from the hackers says it has access to 200 million accounts, another says 300 million and a third says 559 million.
The hackers have given Apple an April 7 deadline before it performs a factory reset on the accounts, wiping all of their data.
We are a new organization, the 7 April 2017 attack isn’t going to be our only one. This is just the start.
— Turkish Crime Family (@turkcrimefamily) March 21, 2017