In my most recent story about Apple's hacking problems within iTunes, I was not surprised to see the same criticisms as eight months ago: there's no evidence of it, it's all the users' fault for their crappy passwords, it's a small problem.

Okay, I'll give you the possibility that this could be partially the user's fault in some way. Like saying the guy run down by a speeding vehicle shouldn't have been driving during rush hour. That does not answer how these hackers are getting in -- which from BetaNews' research on this, is mainly an in-app purchase mechanism issue -- nor the true scope of this problem.

So, I turned to Twitter to answer that question. Frankly, I am shocked with what I found. A simple search just for "iTunes hacked" through Twitter provides hundreds of results just in the past few weeks alone.


If you don't believe me that this hack is a major problem for Apple, you really need to start searching around the social networking services because they reveal a substantial amount of affected users: enough that Apple owes us some type of public acknowledgement of the issue.

Frankly, I find Apple's silence insulting: not only to myself in an attempt to fairly cover this issue and present both sides of the story, but also as a victim of the hack itself. Me, like many others across the Web are only asking for some kind of assurance from Apple that it's working on the problem.

I don't think that's asking too much.

One of my followers over on Google+, Jake Weisz, says it best on Apple's maddening strategy when it comes to negative publicity: "It's probably pretty similar to Apple's behavior with regard to the Mac Defender virus they got last year. Rather than admit they had a problem, they told their employees to deny it's existence until they had a fix".

My iTunes acct got hacked Sun. They say they will refund the $60+ of in-app purchases but haven't yet. Now my acct is suspended. #stabmyself — kristen m stewart (@kristenmstewart) January 19, 2012

Could it be Apple doesn't know how to fix this problem, and that's why the company pretends it doesn't exist? If so, that's pretty worrisome and anyone using iTunes should be concerned about their account security, poor passwords or not.

Crap, someone hacked into my iTunes and bought $42 of stuff using my store credit. Come on Apple, I thought you were better than that! — Patrick (@Traincrossin) January 20, 2012

Add what we're seeing on the social media sites with the dozens of reports that I've received personally in writing the story and I think the argument that this isn't widespread is completely blown up.

#iTunes account hacked overnite and credits drained with fraudulent charges.First #Zappos account, now this. Makes ya want to go off grid — Robert Neill (@rdntx) January 21, 2012

Are you a victim. Has someone made unauthorized purchases to your iTunes account?