What will you do if you wake up one morning to discover that you have just been locked out of your Apple iCloud connected devices? Well, for a number of Australian users, this is what shocked them earlier today.These users awoke to discover that their Apple devices (phones, tablets, desktops and laptops) all appear with a message ‘Device hacked by Oleg Pliss’ on Apple’s Find My Device service and indicating a US $100 fee to unlock their device.
Turning to a community Apple support thread, frustrated users vented out their concern and shared information over the hack. Apart from just hacking their device, a new passcode has also been added; thus further preventing these users from restoring or accessing their device. Some users were able to successfully restore their devices by using an iTunes backup.
As reports continue to flood in, many believe that the attack started in the early morning hours across Australia. A user, deskokat, claimed that he was awoken at 4:30am to find the ‘Hacked by Oleg Pliss’ message on his device along with some sounds being played from it. After being able to change his passwords, the user discovered 15 messages on his hotmail account of a ‘lost’ status on his devices associated with Find My iPhone service. When the devices were marked as ‘Found’, this alerted the sound alarm on the device to go off.
Further comment is still being sought from Apple, Vodafone, Optus, and Telstra. But as of this writing, there has still been no comment from either company. Stayed tuned for further developments on this issue.
Source: ZDNet
Leave a Reply