Rumor: British police arrest man for Apple extortion with ‘iCloud hack’

Britain’s National Crime Agency has reportedly arrested a 20-year-old man for attempting to blackmail Apple with an ‘iCloud hack’. It increasingly appears that the gang behind the “hack” have had no access to any system.

The Motherboard site heard from an alleged Turkish Crime Family group member that the arrest was related to Apple extortion. The National Crime Agency confirms that there has been an arrest and search, but will not say what the case is. It is unknown how many members the group has.

The group called the Turkish Crime Family reached out to the media last week, claiming they could remotely wipe hundreds of millions of iPhones. They asked Apple to pay a ransom to prevent that. Motherboard wrote on Tuesday that Turkish Crime Family contacted LeakBase, a site that collects dumps of databases of hacks, with an offer to publicize their site. In exchange for $3,000 and providing all iCloud account names and passwords in the LeakBase database, the group wanted to promote the site.

It therefore seems that the group does not consist of people who have had unauthorized access to internal networks and databases, but there is a chance that they are criminals who want to earn money by pretending to have committed such hacks.

Apple denied last week that iCloud had been hacked, and the data the hackers released as samples from their alleged database of hundreds of millions of accounts appears to have come from previous hacks. Hacks at Yahoo and LinkedIn, among others, have made databases with hundreds of millions of accounts publicly available online. By trying the combination of e-mail address and password with other services, malicious parties regularly try to gain access to other people’s accounts.