Apple online store hacked

Apple's Korean online store has been defaced by a hacker.

The attack, carried out by someone working under the name 'Dinam', who claimed in his post to be Turkish, was brought to the attention of silicon.com last Thursday.

The defacement was removed from Apple's website shortly after silicon.com alerted the company.

Apple has subsequently refused to comment on the matter.

Jason Hart, CEO of security company Whitehat UK, told silicon.com: "The defacer has managed to get administrator access to the web server."

Although Hart suspected the hacker was after little more than "self-gratification" through vandalising the site, he said Apple should communicate what happened to its customers to end speculation.

Hart said: "The worst thing Apple can do is not tell customers what has happened. It's like all the big companies though - they're constantly having to defend themselves as they're being probed all the time."

The defacement - which took the form of a dozen lines of code posted to the apple.co.kr homepage - was documented on hackers' forum zone-h.org, which said Dinam attacked a Mac OSX server running Apache.

Richard Starnes, president of the Information Systems Security Association UK, said: "Defacements are not that big a deal provided the customer data has not been disclosed or they have suffered an economic impact.

"Defacements just tend to be embarrassing. But we know Apple is a good company and takes defacements seriously."