After growing speculation as to why Apple’s developer portal has been down since last Thursday (18 July), the Cupertino giant revealed the website had been hacked.

The company, in a statement, stressed that sensitive personal information was encrypted and could not be accessed. However, it did concede that the names and emailing addresses from its 275,000 registered third-party developers may have been pilfered.

Apple took the website down for an overhaul in order to bolster security.

“We’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database,” said the firm.

According to the Guardian, a UK newspaper, Ibrahahim Balic, a Turkish security researcher, claims he was behind the “hack” but insisted that his intention was to demonstrate that Apple’s system was leaking user information.

“My intention was not attacking,” he told the newspaper. “In total I found 13 bugs and reported [them] directly one by one to Apple straight away. Just after my reporting [the] dev center got closed. My aim was to report bugs and collect the datas [sic] for the purpose of seeing how deep I can go with it,” he told the newspaper.

Apple, in its statement, gave no indication as to who carried out the attack or what motives lay behind it.

Neither has any timetable been given for the website to be up and running again, although Apple says if a developer’s portal membership is set to expire during the downtime, membership will be extended and apps will remain on the Apple App Store.