A new band of hackers , styling itself the “ Turkish Crime Family ” , is claiming it has secured the details of some 200m iCloud accounts and that if Apple doesn’t pay Attack.Ransom a whopping $ 75,000 bitcoin or ethereum ransom Attack.Ransom ( or $ 100,000 in iTunes gift cards ) it will wipe the lot . First , Apple says its systems haven’t been breached Attack.Databreach . The company told Naked Security : There have not been any breaches Attack.Databreach in any of Apple ’ s systems including iCloud and Apple ID . The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained Attack.Databreach from previously compromised Attack.Databreach third-party services . So 200m accounts obtained Attack.Databreach from previously compromised Attack.Databreach third party services is OK ? Obviously not , but there ’ s no suggestion that Apple itself is responsible for any compromised security . The Turkish Crime Family itself appears to be new on the security scene , believed to have started life in Istanbul but now resident in Green Lanes , north London , according to one report . Helpfully , the organisation has a Twitter account . Another curious facet of the alleged breach is that asking for payment Attack.Ransom in extremely traceable iTunes vouchers seems more than slightly curious ; why would you not ask for something with a less clean audit trail ? The group itself disputes the amount that ’ s been reported and blames a media relations operative ( presumably the same one who put an email address for media inquiries on the Twitter profile ) : This sum of $ 75,000 is incorrect , this was submitted by one of our old media guys that is not a part of our group . The sum is a lot higher The organisation has posted what it claims is video evidence to the Motherboard site . David Kennerley , director of threat research at Webroot , is among the first to wonder whether the threat is actually real . There are a lot of questions that need to be answered such as , do these hackers really have access Attack.Databreach to the data they claim ? How did they get hold of such a large amount of data ? Finally , there are still people who believe their Apple hardware is completely safe from malware just because it ’ s Apple . It ’ s great kit and it works beautifully but nobody is safe Logging into and erasing 200 million accounts would take some time . If it started happening , Apple could easily block the attack . Also , they ’ d have to have some sort of server or admin-level access to be able to wipe or delete accounts , or even a single server ’ s-worth of accounts . The Turkish Crime Family having that level of access would either entail an incredibly serious , hitherto unknown breach in Apple ’ s defenses ( improbable ) , or the help of someone on the inside ( more likely , but still doubtful ) . If an Apple user wasn ’ t backing up their entire device to the Apple Cloud , a device that was wiped wouldn ’ t have everything for Apple to restore . I suspect there are quite a few users that don ’ t do Cloud backups , or only back up a portion of their data .