A 22-year-old man who claimed to have access to over 300 million iCloud accounts and threatened to factory reset all accounts unless Apple pays ransom has pleaded guilty in London for trying to blackmail Apple.
In March 2017, Kerem Albayrak from North London claimed to be a spokesman for a hacking group called the “Turkish Crime Family” and in possession of 319 million iCloud accounts.
Albayrak gave Apple a deadline until April 7, 2017, to pay up $75,000 in crypto-currency or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in return for deleting the copy of stolen database, the U.K. National Crime Agency said in a statement, calling the blackmailer a “fame-hungry cyber-criminal.”
However, if the company failed to meet his demands, Albayrak threatened that he would start remotely wiping the victim’s Apple devices, factory reset iCloud accounts, and dump the stolen database online.
In late March 2017, the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit arrested Albayrak at his home and seized digital devices, including his phone, computers and hard drives, after Apple contacted law enforcement in the U.K. and the U.S.
The NCA investigation into the matter confirmed that there were no signs of a compromise of…
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