Some Apple device owners in Australia were recently awoken in the middle of the night to a booming "Find My iPhone" alarm, along with a message that their devices had been hacked.
An ominous message appeared on various iPhones, iPads and Mac computers across various regions in Australia early Monday morning, urging owners to send $50 to a PayPal account to unlock hacked devices. The incident was first reported by The Sydney Morning Herald.
The prompt said the devices were hacked by "Oleg Pliss." A Google search for the name brought up a software engineer at Oracle, a banker in the Ukraine and others in Russia. It remains unclear at this point how the iOS devices were hacked, but affected users should update their iCloud passwords immediately.
Those that received the message were quick to jump on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to see if others were sent the same note.
Lots of I-Phone's, I-Pad's & Mac's hacked across the country today. Have you been affected? http://t.co/8nQpddwLcH pic.twitter.com/oRnJUTeJSf— Aaron Lucas (@AaronLucasBris) May 27, 2014
Woken up at 2am by hacked 'Find My iPhone' asking for money, no sleeping after trying to sort that out so at work at 6am: Today will be fun.— Casey Maree (@_caseymaree_) May 26, 2014
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Has anyone had their phone weirdly hacked through unprompted use of Find My iPhone?— Ms Mindy Chops (@mindychops) May 27, 2014
Although the message asked owners to send money to a specific PayPal account, the report said no PayPal account is set up with the listed email address. PayPal reportedly plans to refund the money sent by the hacker's victims.
The company has not yet responded to a request for comment.