A 22-year-old man who claimed to have access to more than 300 million iCloud accounts00 million iCloud accounts—and threatened to wipe them unless Apple paid a ransom—has pleaded guilty in London to attempting to blackmail the company.
In March 2017, the attacker from North London said he was a spokesperson for a hacking group calling itself the "Turkish Crime Family" and claimed to possess data from 319 million iCloud accounts.
According to a statement from the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA), he gave Apple a deadline of April 7, 2017, demanding $75,000 in cryptocurrency or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in exchange for deleting the alleged database. The agency described him as a "fame-hungry cyber-criminal."
He threatened that if Apple failed to comply, he would remotely wipe victims' Apple devices, factory-reset iCloud accounts, and publish the stolen data online.
Later that month, the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit arrested him at his home after Apple contacted law enforcement authorities in both the U.K. and the U.S. Investigators seized multiple digital devices, including his phone, computers, and hard drives.
The investigation found no evidence of a breach of Apple's iCloud infrastructure. Instead, the data he claimed to possess originated from previously compromised third-party services, most of which were no longer active.
Earlier this month, he pleaded guilty to one count of blackmail and two counts of unauthorized acts intended to impair or hinder access to computer systems.
On December 20, he was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to a two-year suspended prison sentence, 300 hours of unpaid community work, and a six-month electronic curfew.
He later told investigators that once someone becomes involved in cybercrime, "it just escalates." He added that the appeal lies in the perceived power and recognition: "When you have power on the internet, it's like fame—and everyone is chasing that right now."
