UK hacker pleads guilty to blackmailing Apple with iCloud account information

By: Noah M.

A British hacker was spared jail time for trying to shake down Apple for $100,000 in gift cards by threatening to leak the information of millions of iCloud accounts, authorities said.

Kerem Albayrak, of North London, was sentenced Friday to a suspended term of two years in jail for the unsuccessful 2017 scam that United Kingdom officials linked to a hacker group called the “Turkish Crime Family.”

Albayrak, 22, contacted Apple in March 2017 claiming to have a cache of 319 million iCloud accounts, according to the UK’s National Crime Agency. He threatened to reset all of them and sell his databases online unless Apple gave him 1,000 iTunes gift cards worth $100 each or $75,000 in cryptocurrency, authorities said.

Albayrak later sent Apple a YouTube video of himself appearing to access two random iCloud accounts and upped his demand to $100,000, authorities said. He also sent the video link to several media outlets, according to authorities.

But both the National Crime Agency and Apple found no signs that Albayrak had compromised the company’s network, authorities said. His data actually came from “previously compromised third-party services which were mostly inactive,” the agency said.

UK officers arrested Albayrak at his home and seized his computers, phone and hard drive about two weeks after his initial threat, authorities said.

Investigators discovered through phone records that he was the spokesperson for the Turkish Crime Family and once promised the group “A LOT of media attention” from the planned Apple attack, the crime agency said.

“When you have power on the internet it’s like fame and everyone respects you, and everyone is chasing that right now,” Albayrak reportedly told investigators.

Albayrak — whom the crime agency called a “fame-hungry cyber-criminal” — pleaded guilty to one count of blackmail and two counts of unauthorized acts meant to hinder access to a computer. In addition to the suspended jail sentence, he was slapped with 300 hours of unpaid labor and a six-month electronic curfew, officials said.