Common sign of iTunes account hacking?

My AppStore access stopped working last night. I went to the AppStore icon on my iPhone and iPad and both showed updates available for download so I did my usual thing and launched the AppStore app and pressed the button to apply all the updates. As usual I then got asked for my password and, after I entered it, I got a "This Apple ID is not available" message pop up. The Apple ID that it told me was not available was my correct ID that I'd been using successfully ever since I got my devices.

At first I thought that an Apple data center might be having a temporary glitch so I tried a few times during the day with the same results. I then started to get worried so I tried logging onto MobileMe via the web from my desktop PC and I got a message saying something like "Too many failed login attempts, you must reset your password". I reset my password using the verify via email method and everything started working again.

I'm thinking that sometime prior to my seeing the first "This Apple ID is not available" message pop up on my iPhone/iPad that someone must have found my user ID and tried hacking my password and, although they presumeably failed (if they had succeeded then I think they would have tried to change my email address or spent some of my money), they must have locked my account by having too many guesses at my password.

Have other people seen the same thing? Did you draw the same conclusion as me?

My new password is now much, much stronger than my old one. Be careful, it's a jungle out there!

- Julian

The plot thickens. If my theory was correct, I wondered how the hackers got my userID since it is my email address and never knowingly post it anywhere puplic. Well, I just got this from Mozilla today...

Dear addons.mozilla.org user,

The purpose of this email is to notify you about a possible disclosure of your information which occurred on December 17th. On this date, we were informed by a 3rd party who discovered a file with individual user records on a public portion of one of our servers. ... This file was placed on this server by mistake and was a partial representation of the users database from addons.mozilla.org. The file included email addresses, first and last names, and an md5 hash representation of your password...

Click to expand...

The above might explain how my email address got into the wild.

Again to other people, there's never really a bad time to change one's password for added security but, especially if you've got an account with the Mozilla addon site, now might be a particularly good time to do it if you use the same email address for Mozilla and your Apple ID.

- Julian