Hackers threaten to wipe 200 million iPhones on April 7 unless Apple pays $1 million

A group of hackers calling themselves ‘Turkish Crime Family’ are threatening to wipe 200 million iPhones on April 7 – unless Apple pays a $1 million ransom.

The group, which is from Turkey, but also affiliated with Green Lanes, north London, claims to have the ability to reset people’s iPhones and iCloud accounts on a massive scale.

The group – speaking with Yahoo News via Twitter – says that it has the capacity to reset 637,500 accounts per minute.

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Unless the ransom is paid, the group will initiate an attack on 200 million accounts on April 7.

The group says that previous reports distort their goals – and have under-reported their ransom demands to Apple.

The group says, ‘We requested in total $1 million worth in iTunes vouchers for instant resale at 60% of the original gift card value, plus some private stuff that we have agreed not to publicise as we believe it may ruin Turkish Crime Family & Apple relations. The second thing is worth more to us than money.’

‘Our entire group isn’t based on this single attack, we’re a new criminal organization with a lot of resources & power. This is just the start.’

Paul Calatayud, Chief Technology Officer at FireMon said, ‘I believe these claims are accurate, but also most likely not caused by Apple. If you do not add two factor strong authentication to any account, there is a chance that the password has been exposed, harvested, or guessed.’