You’ve probably seen a lot of press recently about nude photographs of several celebrities being published, and how that’s linked to iCloud somehow. Today I wanted to remind you of some advice I first posted back in December 2013.

There are so many “cloud” services available these days, and many people use them as a great way of storing their important files, particularly photographs. While, Apple (and the FBI) are still in the early stages of investigating how these celeb’s images have come to light, it does seem likely that they are part of one or more attempts to hack into Apple’s iCloud accounts.

There has been one confirmed report that iCloud didn’t prevent repeated attempts to guess your password (this was patched by Apple immediately to lock you out after 5 incorrect password attempts), and there’s a higher than likely chance (in my opinion) that this is the method the hacker(s) have used to gain access. All they would need is the celeb’s iCloud account (an email address), and a lot of guesses at their password to be able to see everything in that person’s account. Celebrities normally know other celebrities, so once you get into one account you’d probably have a wealth of new email addresses to run through…….

The important thing to note here though is that the act of guessing passwords would be relatively slow (in comparison to hacking a compromised user database), so the chances of someone guessing a celeb’s password are massively increased by them choosing a real word, or date perhaps. By having a long, complex and unique password you’d reduce the risk exponentially of someone gaining access to an account this way.

So, my advice to you today is twofold:
1. Please read my original post on this matter
2.  At the very least, change your iCloud password today to something complex and unique

You might also want to review every other password you have, and read my notes on the password manager, 1 Password In the original post to help you record them all for reference.

Oh, and if you have any potentially embarrassing photographs of yourself, the cloud is really not the right place to store them 🙂

Have a great day!

Links for things mentioned:

 

Links for things mentioned:

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