“Oleg Pliss” strikes again. Screengrab: The Age
FORTUNE — The first report appeared on Apple’s (AAPL) support site Monday at 4:47 a.m. From a user in Melbourne, Australia, who called herself veritylikestea.
Within 24 hours, the discussion veritylikestea started had generated 230 replies, 11,000 views and — this being Apple — at least 20 news stories. Whoever was passing themselves off as Oleg Pliss (the name of a senior software engineer at Oracle) had struck perhaps a dozen users, most of them in Australia and New Zealand.
So far, there have been no reports of ransoms being paid. Users who had set a passcode on their devices were able to unlock them the usual way. Users who hadn’t could call Apple support or follow the instructions at iOS: Forgot passcode or device disabled.
It’s not clear how the highjacking was carried out. The leading theory is that someone bought or hacked their way into a list of Australian iCloud e-mail addresses and passwords.