A large number of celebrity nude photos have been leaked online on Sunday. The leak first tracked back to the 4chan /b board supposedly shows huge stars such as Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande and Kate Upton in the nude.
The anonymous hacker claimed that the 423 photos were taken from the individual iCloud accounts and has asked for Bitcoin donations in order to release more of the photos. So far the hacker(s) have managed to collect 0.257666 bitcoin as it can be verified at this bitcoin address. The FBI and Apple are currently investigating the major privacy breach but so far no official statement has been released disclosing how the hacker(s) got a hold of the pictures.
Several of the photos have been confirmed to be real, including those of Jennifer Lawrence. On the other hand, several have been claimed to be fake, including those of Ariana Grande.
There are numerous theories as to how the hackers got into the stars iCloud accounts. Mainstream media is calling the incident a “phone hack” which leaves a lot to the imagination. What is known is that at least Jennifer Lawrence is an iCloud user. She has been quoted in an interview with MTV as saying:
“My iCloud keeps telling me to back it up, and I’m like, I don’t know how to back you up. Do it yourself.”
Meta data embedded in the pictures also shows that most of the photos were taken using Apple devices.
So how could it happen? The most likely culprit seems to be a good old fashion fishing scam. If the hackers could have somehow gotten a hold of the stars’ email which they used to sign up for their iCloud account, they could have sent a fake email pretending to be Apple asking the celebrities to enter their usernames and passwords. Giving the hackers access to the Photostream. In order to download the photos however, the hackers would need to connect an Apple device to the account which would trigger an email being sent to the account from Apple. Notifications to other Apple devices connected to the account would also be sent, alerting the users of a hack attempt giving them plenty of time to change their passwords.
Another theory which has emerged and is gaining momentum is that the phones have been hacked via WiFi at a celebrity event such as the recent MTV VMAs, where all the stars were in close proximity to each other.
I’m sure we will learn the full story very soon but until then should you be worried?
Yes and no. The hack seems to have been targeted at high profile user accounts, so your pictures and other private information is most likely safe. That does not mean however that you should not take the necessary steps to protect your data. Uploading sensitive information to a cloud back up always runs the risk of it being seen by others. So keep your nudies on your local devices.
Turn on the two-step verification for your iCloud, this will force anyone wanting to gain access to your data to have physical access to your device. Android devices also have two-step authentication.
Make sure you have pin protection enabled on your mobile devices and never store sensitive passwords in the device’s memory.
Make your passwords and verification questions difficult to guess. This is not the first time celebrity nudies have been leaked online. In 2011 a hacker managed to get into many celebrity accounts by simply guessing passwords.
Your date of birth or name of your pet make for lousy passwords.
Learn from other people’s mistakes and keep your sensitive data safe.
Source: Bzzill.com