Journalist Gets Hacked While Writing Apple-FBI Story

On a recent American Airlines flight from Dallas to Raleigh, journalist Steven Petrow decided to get some work done on a story he was writing about the potential impact on ordinary Americans of the battle between Apple and the FBI over creating a tool that will allow the FBI to access virtually any iPhone.

The feud has divided the public, lawmakers, and tech CEOs over a person’s right to privacy versus the need for national security. The FBI says it needs a backdoor into the iPhone so it can extract data from terrorists’ iPhones, while Apple says creating a backdoor would leave everyone open to increased attacks from hackers.

When the flight took off, Petrow’s stance on the matter was "I don’t really need to worry about online privacy," he wrote. "I’ve got nothing to hide. And who would want to know what I’m up to, anyway?" But by the time Petrow landed, he found out "in a chillingly personal way" just how much the outcome of the Apple-FBI battle matters to everyone.

That’s because Petrow had been hacked mid-flight. Petrow logged in to the Gogo in-flight Internet connection to read and send emails to sources for his story. As the plane landed in Raleigh and Petrow got up to disembark, a passenger behind him revealed that he knew Petrow was a journalist and had just been working on the Apple-FBI story. The passenger even recited an email Petrow had received from a security expert back to him almost verbatim. This passenger knew all this information, he revealed, because he had hacked Petrow’s computer in-flight, as well as the computing devices of almost every other passenger on the plane. "That’s how I know you’re interested in the Apple story," the hacker said. "Imagine if you had been doing a financial transaction.”