Massive Celebrity iCloud Hack: Who’s to Blame?
The internet world went abuzz yesterday when one hacker picked up images from the iCloud accounts of celebrities such Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande, Kate Upton and posted them online. This massive breach of privacy was taken very seriously as it hit some of the most prominent public faces and consequently raised concerns about the security of user data.
The fault of this massive leak lies on Apple. The failure of iCloud’s security features caused this breach. One of the main culprits of the heist is said to be the ‘Find My iPhone’ API, which let hackers try different passwords repeatedly without getting locked out. This fault was addressed by Apple after it came to light.
Hackers accessed personal accounts through a loophole in Apple’s “Find My iPhone” service
The hacker said that he held hundreds of other nude and semi-nude pictures. He demanded $40,000 in Bitcoins for releasing more photos. Thankfully the world felt a lot better and saner when all that the guy got was 0.2 Bitcoins which amount to just $95. It is said that hacker got a whiff of Jennifer Lawrence using iCloud when she said at an award function that she doesn’t understand how to back-up on iCloud.
The important part to remember is that if you go looking for these pictures, you are becoming a party to the side that is harassing the actresses. The lesson was well-learnt by professional pain-in-the-butt of celebrities, Perez Hilton, who said that they were removing the images from their website. You can see how severe the privacy breach was; the guy who makes a living out of the misfortunes of others had the decency to bring down the violating images. So be good and stay away from 4chan for good.
