Hackers Crack Apple Encryption, Offer Fake but Valid iTunes Gift Cards
Pirating music and other media, as The Pirate Bay trial has proved, is a messy business that might end up with somebody spending a lot of time in jail. If you get a fake iTunes Store gift card worth $200 for $2.60 courtesy of the Chinese hackers which managed to crack the algorithm used by Apple to generate these vouchers, you no longer need to pirate music, you can actually purchase it. I will admit that you are still on the wrong side of the law and that prison sentence might still become true, but at least you are not a music pirate any more.
In all seriousness now, it seems that an unknown person or persons managed to break through the encryption used to generate Apple iTunes Store gift cards and are now monetizing their undertaking by selling $200 vouchers for as little as 17.9 Renminbi (RMB) or Chinese yuan, the currency of the People's Republic of China (PRC) - which converted into US dollars is about $2.6.
The ones to draw our attention to this phenomenon is the Chinese music industry consultancy firm Outdustry: “Digital music is proving to be a tough sell in the P.R.C, partly because of the market dominance of Baidu’s free mp3 search. There are, however, people making decent profit in this as yet unmeasurable market: the hackers of Apple’s iTunes store gift vouchers and their local agents. There are thousands of cards for sale. All the seller actually sells is the gift voucher code. You can then redeem the card in your iTunes account.”
According to Outdustry, this whole thing is not only done in plain view, but it is also done on the biggest C2C online shopping site in China – that would be Taobao. All you have to do is go through the vast offer and find a seller that is online; then use Taobao’s own IM (instant messaging) client to negotiate with the seller. You will get a voucher code via the IM client which you can then use to redeem an iTunes Store Gift Card.
Taobao online shop owner said that these codes are created by means of key-generators and that the practice is not exactly new. Six months ago you could just as well get a $200 gift card from the hackers, just that back then you had to pay 320 RMB, not 18RMB.
Tags: Apple, iTunes, Gift Cards, Hacker, China
In all seriousness now, it seems that an unknown person or persons managed to break through the encryption used to generate Apple iTunes Store gift cards and are now monetizing their undertaking by selling $200 vouchers for as little as 17.9 Renminbi (RMB) or Chinese yuan, the currency of the People's Republic of China (PRC) - which converted into US dollars is about $2.6.
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The ones to draw our attention to this phenomenon is the Chinese music industry consultancy firm Outdustry: “Digital music is proving to be a tough sell in the P.R.C, partly because of the market dominance of Baidu’s free mp3 search. There are, however, people making decent profit in this as yet unmeasurable market: the hackers of Apple’s iTunes store gift vouchers and their local agents. There are thousands of cards for sale. All the seller actually sells is the gift voucher code. You can then redeem the card in your iTunes account.”
According to Outdustry, this whole thing is not only done in plain view, but it is also done on the biggest C2C online shopping site in China – that would be Taobao. All you have to do is go through the vast offer and find a seller that is online; then use Taobao’s own IM (instant messaging) client to negotiate with the seller. You will get a voucher code via the IM client which you can then use to redeem an iTunes Store Gift Card.
Taobao online shop owner said that these codes are created by means of key-generators and that the practice is not exactly new. Six months ago you could just as well get a $200 gift card from the hackers, just that back then you had to pay 320 RMB, not 18RMB.
Tags: Apple, iTunes, Gift Cards, Hacker, China
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Hackers Crack Apple Encryption, Offer Fake but Valid iTunes Gift Cards
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