Intelbroker seems to be busy lately. The notorious cyber-breaching team claims it hacked Apple shortly after breaking into AMD earlier this week. AMD is investigating these claims, assisted by competent agencies, but Apple hasn’t officially assessed the situation. Although it might sound funny that AMD was breached by a team called Intel-Broker, the situation is severe. If confirmed, this can only be bad news, although AMD has officially stated that the impact won’t be significant. On the other hand, Apple is known for its robust security measures, although they are imperfect.
AMD was victimized again back in 2022 by another hacking group, the RansomHouse. It responded by taking extra measures and fore-guarding better against cyber threats. The RansomHouse claimed back then they didn’t expect to violate AMD so easily and that employees had such weak passwords (e.g., 1234). If verified, it is not known what AMD has to deal with this time. But it indeed has to deal with a challenging situation. On BreachForums, Intelbroker claimed that Apple’s hack accessed the source code of three internal company tools, and AppleMacroPlugin is among them (the other two are AppleConnect-SSO and Apple-HWE-Confluence-Advanced). We have yet to see how Apple will handle this stiff situation.
There is a chance that these claims might not be true or partially accurate, but Intelbroker is neither a newcomer in this field nor a random player. So, we have to take their claims with extreme caution. It is not yet clarified if the breached data (if it is in effect) will be for sale. It is a possible scenario, though. The Dark Web is dark for a reason. It won’t be the first time organizations and companies have been hacked, and it certainly won’t be the last. Some people might profit from these. It might be unethical, but still, it is a fact. And facts can’t be ignored. We have yet to see if these claims are true and how Apple and AMD will handle these incidents. This article will be updated if further progress is made, so stay tuned!
