iCloud Hacked: Here's What We Know About the Celebrity Photo Hack

There was a post on 4chan which described what supposedly happened. This description seems to me most likely http://i.imgur.com/BR7oSUK.jpg

I'm a skeptical panda. A hundred different celebrities pictures are leaked, and all the article can do is keep reiterating, with no evidence at all, that it's "unlikely" to be a security problem in iCloud or some similar service. If it were just one or two accounts I'd find the alternate explanations (social engineering, etc) more plausible.

Even if the leaks result from one at a time social engineering, it still really calls into question the practical security of the cloud. I doubt it's much harder to steal, e.g. confidential business documents from executives' cloud accounts than it is to steal pictures from celebrities' cloud accounts.

If I were a big organization with confidential information, I'd really be thinking hard about my cloud policies and my BYOD policies right now. The policy at my previous employer (we handled a lot of extremely sensitive information), was pretty draconian: data never leaves a company desktop, laptop, or blackberry.

"WAS IT VIA ANOTHER SERVICE? Since many of the images appear to have been taken with Android devices and webcams, the leaked images may not have originated from the iCloud photo backup service at all. Many services have automatic backup tools, and could be accessed in similar ways to iCloud (as above)."

Ok - let's blame iCloud for some stolen images from iOS devices. But how to explain Android ones? There is no iCloud for Android and never will be. Some apps as G+, DropBox, Box also do "picture backup" and run on many mobile OSes. Why everyone blame iCloud for some hole that can't be used more than 36 hours for hacking over 100s accounts.

My guess - there is fault in some very popular application that have access to your photos. So maybe insider in company owning this app can leak them or hackers take control over app. In all cases this is huge PR crisis for them.

"While it’s highly unlikely to be a security issue with iCloud, the incident has served to remind us all of the issues around internet security in general."

Uhhh... pardon me? Potentially 100 high profile users just had their private photos removed from their private accounts and this "likely" isn't an issue with the system? What would be a security issue then?

Edit: Followed by this double negative which is accidental but still makes me smile:

"It’s highly unlikely that the “hacker” (or it may have been a group of hackers) was not able to breach Apple’s security in general..."

I think now is a good a time as any to reflect on the wise words of Taylor Swift,

> You cannot leak that which does not exist. That's the ultimate answer. But that's the same philosophy as abstinence. We need education. - https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/50629058660991385...

seems like a bad title, suggests there is some proof iCloud was hacked while the article states it wasn't likely.

> While it’s highly unlikely to be a security issue with iCloud, the incident has served to remind us all of the issues around internet security in general.

"...almost certainly safe" Is that similar to "definitely maybe"?

What an advertisement. How much did Apple pay them for this?

Yeah this article is completely awful and was most likely written by someone without any security knowledge whatsoever. Considering the number of victims, all of the possibilities discussed in this article are completely unreasonable.

There's only 2 real possibilities here:

1. iCloud was hacked

2. Someone at Apple can access the data and decided to leak it

I'm leaning towards number 2 myself.