IT Компромат - правда о HiTech

The hacker, who identified himself as "orin0co," claimed to have broken into Jobs' Amazon account in an effort to sell personal account details of the alleged hack to journalists. The hacker apparently contacted Wired News Managing Editor Leander Kahney via e-mail, which Kahney posted at his Cult of Mac blog site.

In an e-mail exchange with Kahney, the hacker claims that Jobs made more than 20,000 online purchases at Amazon.com over the last 10 years. The hacker then offered a screenshot of three purchases, with credit-card details blanked out, as proof of the hack.

The hacker contended to Kahney that he tricked Jobs in a phishing attack that impersonated an Amazon.com site, which enticed users into submitting personal and financial information by requesting that they "update" their account credentials.

"Among some other unknown person, Steve Jobs got my mail, he didn't notice the scam I set so he 'updated' his amazon account with data (name, address, credit card number, phone, amazon user and password) which I received, sent to my mail," the hacker wrote.

orin0co also said that neither Jobs nor Amazon knew of the attack, maintaining that it was not his intention to misuse the information he acquired, but rather "the sole purpose was if the 'scam' was so perfect that even IT Guru's will fall on it," he said in the e-mail.

"Imagine how safe Mac is if you can trick the mighty Steve Jobs?" the hacker said in a subsequent e-mail.

The hacker finalizes his request by suggesting that he would take the information straight to competing journalists if Kahney didn't pay up. "I intend to sell this information, that's why I picked you as first on the list," the e-mail claims. "If you are not interested, I am sure other book authors on SJ life (Jeffrey Yung, William Simon, Alan Deutschman, Anthony Imbimbo, Daniel Lyons or any others) will be very interested to know about this," he said.

First of all, I know I'm not the first to say how ridiculous this claim actually is. The e-mails are written in classic halted English grammar, complete with incorrect word spellings and word usage. You fully expect the hacker to then announce he's a Nigerian prince looking for somewhere to stash his inheritance.

And really, the likelihood that Apple's head honcho would fall for such simplistic phishing attack is slim at best. If I know better than to click on unsolicited requests to update account information, then I'm pretty sure that the leader of one of the biggest IT companies in the world does too.

Then there's the evidence, or apparent lack thereof. There is absolutely no proof. The screenshot shows only a list of three purchases, the most recently visible dating back to October 2008. Had Jobs actually made 20,000 purchases on Amazon, he would have had to buy, on average, about five to six items per day, every day, for the last 10 years. That amount of merchandise seems dizzying, even for someone like Steve Jobs. Plus that statistic alone seems to suggest that Jobs would have made more than three purchases in the last six months.

It's entirely possible the hacker himself created his own account as "Steve Jobs," bought himself some items, and took a screenshot. Or maybe his Web design skills were better than his English language skills and he created a very convincing fake screenshot.

In any case, Apple didn't immediately respond to Channelweb.com's request for comment. And really, why would they? It is entirely possible that the attempted phishing victim was not Jobs, but Kahney himself.