Apple credits security researcher Balic with reporting Developer Center vulnerability

Apple has updated its Apple Web Server notifications page to credit security researcher Ibrahim Balic, amongst others, for reporting security issues with the company’s servers. Balic is the researcher who claimed that he was possibly the “intruder” thanks to whom Apple’s Developer Center underwent a month-long derailment.

The post was discovered by 9to5Mac and credits several others for reporting potential security issues in Apple’s web servers. This means Balic was not the intruder who forced Apple to shut its website for a while.

Credits where they’re due

Balic, a White Hat, had claimed that he was possibly the reason behind the outage since he managed to demonstrate how the flaw allowed him to gather full names and Apple IDs of developers from the website. Apple had coincidentally announced that it had deliberately shut down its Developer Center to fix the flaw around the same time. The Cupertino-based company admitted that it had been attacked by an intruder in July and while sensitive personal information was encrypted and safe, it was possible that some names, mailing addresses and email addresses of a few developers could have been compromised.

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The company launched a system status page to inform developers of the progress of restoring services after the hack and the Developer Center went completely online earlier in August. While this pretty much proves that it could not have been him behind the attack, Balic has claimed that other bugs pointed out by him are still waiting to be listed on the Web Service page. Now if only Khalil, the Palestinian researcher who broke into Mark Zuckerberg’s account to report a bug to Facebook, could get this recognition too.

(Cover image credit: Reuters)