THE DOWNLOAD: Keep Your Head out of the iCloud

By JACOB LOPEZ
Staff Writer
reporter@sbnewspaper.com

Jacob Lopez

Jacob Lopez

By now you may have already read about the handful of celebrities whose compromising photos leaked for all the internet to see.

Such popular female stars  as Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton were the targets of an internet hacker — or group of hackers — who found joy in prying into the personal photo collections of others and releasing them publicly.

According to most tech experts, hackers used a brute force attack on Apple’s Find My iPhone service to crack celebrity iCloud passwords.

Allow us to backtrack for a second: Apple typically designs its services so that they cannot be susceptible to brute force hacks, which are attacks in which the hacker uses an application that generates thousands of random passwords for a user until it finds a match.

For some reason, a newbie Apple software engineer who is most likely updating his résumé right now, didn’t have the foresight to ensure that Apple’s Find My iPhone service is protected from such attacks. Because iPhones by default upload photos to iCloud automatically, the attacker gained access to the celebrity photo collections.

This teaches us that the majority of the internet has apparently not seen a bare breast. Second, it teaches us how possible it is for someone with enough determination to access your personal photos. Granted, we aren’t prime targets like the 100 or so celebrities whose photos hit the internet earlier this week, it should serve as a warning that we are all vulnerable.

This doesn’t mean we should fear our iPhones. We just need to use a bit of common sense when using them. It’s a horrible idea to take photos of your naughty bits with a pocket-sized device that’s connected to the internet 24 hours a day. It’s no smarter than leaving your valuables in the car. Sure, nobody deserves to have their car broken into and their purse or wallet stolen, but exercising caution will make you far less likely to endure such consequences later.

Before anyone goes around taking and sending those “secret,” naughty photos to anyone, keep in mind that the only thing between yourself and a tarred reputation with a hearty dose of total humiliation — or blackmail, at the very least — is a few taps of a touchscreen.

 

Permanent link to this article: https://www.sbnewspaper.com/2014/09/05/the-download-keep-your-head-out-of-the-icloud/

1 comment

    • Howard Johnson on September 6, 2014 at 4:31 pm
    • Reply

    Hackers, modern day heroes. Never fear somebody watching them.

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