Lawrence’s publicist says the photos are real, though not how old they are. Alternatively, the stars used the same password on multiple services, which were captured through that. The company had no statement at the time of publication.įerguson suggests that the hacker may have used the “forgot password” link on Apple’s iCloud system after gathering the celebrities’ email addresses – perhaps from the address book of another hacked device. Comparatively few people use 2FA, however, either because they don’t know about it or find it cumbersome.Īpple is still investigating whether the data was all taken from its iCloud service and, if so, to what extent users’ accounts were compromised. The only block to that is if the account owner has enabled “ two-factor authentication” (2FA) – an extra layer of security that will send a code to the owner’s phone before it allows login. If you have a user’s email address and password for their iCloud service, you can log in to their account and download those photos and other details. Even the original poster is not claiming that,” noted Rik Ferguson, vice-president of security research at Trend Micro.Īs with the many celebrity hacks (and daily hacks that affect less famous people), the simpler and more likely explanation is the leak of an email and password combination, either through guesswork or “phishing”, when users are fooled by authentic-looking sites into entering their login details, which are then used against them.Īpple is still investigating what is claimed to be an attack on its iCloud service, which is used by iPhone users to store settings and, crucially, which backs up photos taken with the phone to “cloud” servers. “A wide scale ‘hack’ of Apple’s iCloud is unlikely. Large companies like Apple have dedicated in-house security teams who attempt to break into their own systems regularly.

The most headline-grabbing possibility for the source of the photos – a full-on frontal-assault ground-up hack of Apple’s iCloud service – is also the least likely.

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