If you want to impress a company, hacking them probably isn’t the way to go. Unfortunately, that’s the exact tactic one Australian teenager used in 2015 and 2017.
Recently, the 17-year-old was sentenced to nine months probation by a judge who encouraged him to use his talents “for good,” Business Insider reported.
The teenager originally hacked Apple’s mainframe with the help of another teenager when he was 13-years-old. Using his “high level of expertise,” he created false credentials to break into the server where he downloaded internal documents and data, according to the Australian Broadcasting Network.
Apple alerted the FBI after the company detected a breach. As a result, the Australian Federal Police ended up raiding the boy’s home. Gizmodo Australia reported that police discovered 90GB of files in a folder titled “hacky hack hack.”
“We regard the data security of our users as one of our greatest responsibilities and want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised,” Apple told Business Insider in a statement about the case last year.
Mark Twiggs, the lawyer representing the teenager, told the Adelaide Youth Court that his client didn’t realize how serious his actions were, according to the Australian Broadcasting Network.
“This offending started when my client was 13 years of age, a very young age,” Twiggs said. He had no idea about the seriousness of the offence and hoped that when it was discovered he might gain employment at this company. He didn’t know this was going to lead to anything other than a job at the end of it, [this] happened in Europe, a similar person got caught and they ended up getting employed by the company.”
While it’s impressive (and concerning) that a 13-year-old was able to hack one of the worlds biggest, richest, most powerful companies, it’s generally unlikely to get positive reactions from any potential employer. But who knows, they may be impressed and give him the shot he was looking for. Stranger things have happened.
