New Details Emerge on Security Researcher Potentially Responsible for Dev Center Outage
Early this morning, independent security researcher Ibrahim Balic speculated that he may responsible for the security breach that caused an extended outage of Apple's Developer Center, which has been offline since late last week.
Despite Balic's claim that he reported his findings directly to Apple and did not intend to act maliciously, information that he gave in an interview with TechCrunch suggests somewhat questionable behavior.
Balic, who has reported 13 different bugs to Apple, originally discovered an iAd Workbench vulnerability on June 18 that allowed a request sent to the server to be manipulated. This security hole could be used to acquire the names and email addresses of iTunes users (even non-developers). After finding the loophole, Balic wrote a Python script to harvest data from the vulnerability and then displayed it in a YouTube video, which may have put him on Apple's radar.
