Apple has some major explaining to do after it emerged that nude photos of A-list celebrities were published on 4chan, the anonymous image-sharing site. A total of 101 celebrities were targeted by the hacker who allegedly broke into their iCloud accounts and stole the images.
One such celebrity was Jennifer Lawrence, whose spokesperson confirmed that the images are indeed genuine and that they will be taking legal action against anyone who stole and posted Ms Lawrence’s photos.
It has been suggested that the hacker has been able to hack into celebrity iCloud accounts but everyone seemed baffled as to how it was done. However some savvy programmers think they have discovered how it could have been done. One potential exploit that the hacker could have used has to do with a bug that was discovered in the ‘Find My iPhone’ feature by the developers.
This bug means that anyone wanting to hack an account can keep on using different passwords until the right one is dicovered. The result is that with enough time and effort, someone could gain access to AppleIDs. The perpotrator would have needed the email address of each celebrity but it is possible that once they had access to one, it was easy to obtain others via the contacts list or inbox of the original victim.
The developers who found this exploit have confirmed that it has been fixed, however the fact that so many celebrities were affected certainly makes this event an unusual one. The images have been pulled from the various sites hosting them, with Twitter apparently taking a firm stance by suspending any accounts that share the images.
Among the celebrities affected by this security breach are Kate Upton, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kirsten Dunst and Kelly Brook but it does leave everyone wondering just how safe is iCloud?
One such celebrity was Jennifer Lawrence, whose spokesperson confirmed that the images are indeed genuine and that they will be taking legal action against anyone who stole and posted Ms Lawrence’s photos.
It has been suggested that the hacker has been able to hack into celebrity iCloud accounts but everyone seemed baffled as to how it was done. However some savvy programmers think they have discovered how it could have been done. One potential exploit that the hacker could have used has to do with a bug that was discovered in the ‘Find My iPhone’ feature by the developers.
This bug means that anyone wanting to hack an account can keep on using different passwords until the right one is dicovered. The result is that with enough time and effort, someone could gain access to AppleIDs. The perpotrator would have needed the email address of each celebrity but it is possible that once they had access to one, it was easy to obtain others via the contacts list or inbox of the original victim.
The developers who found this exploit have confirmed that it has been fixed, however the fact that so many celebrities were affected certainly makes this event an unusual one. The images have been pulled from the various sites hosting them, with Twitter apparently taking a firm stance by suspending any accounts that share the images.
Among the celebrities affected by this security breach are Kate Upton, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kirsten Dunst and Kelly Brook but it does leave everyone wondering just how safe is iCloud?
