UPDATED 16:44 EDT / JULY 29 2013

NEWS

Development Platform of Apple App Store Partially Back Online

After days of silence over the development of Apple developer site that outraged developers, Apple has started waking up its Developer Centre.

If you’ll recall, Apple confirmed that its dev portal was hacked last week due to a database breach by a Turkish bloke. The world’s largest technology company delivered its usual non-deluge of information about just what caused it to pull the site down last week, causing angered programmers to spend a weekend without any work.

Apple has clarified its stance to an extent at that time. Macworld reported Apple’s email sent to developers:

“Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

“In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.”

As of now, there is no clarification as what components or accounts have been breached by the hackers but Cnet reported some users have complained about receiving password reset e-mails, indicating that attacker might have obtained a number of Apple developer account IDs.

An update maintenance page says “the company is working to bring our developer services back online and thanks developers “for bearing with us while we bring these important systems back online. We will continue to update you with our progress.”

Meanwhile, the good half of the systems is back online, and Apple continues to work to suppress any further attacks on its internal systems in the future.

According to the latest Dev status page, several development systems are now up and running including Identifiers & Profiles, Safari Dev Center, Certificates, Software Downloads, Mac Dev Center and iOS Dev Center. Technical support sections, Program Enrollment and Renewals, App Store Resource Center, Videos, Pre-Release Documentation, Xcode Automatic Configuration and Videos and the forums are still offline at this time.


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