Apple denies claims that poor security led to leak

If you have been online any time this past week, you most likely know by now that Labor Day weekend was host to a massive leak of celebrity nudes that were stolen from iCloud accounts. Though clearly an illegal and immoral breach of privacy, events like this occur quite often. However, what made this one shake up the internet so badly was the sheer massiveness and breadth of the image cache — hundreds of nude, semi-nude and revealing photos of celebrities, ranging from actresses, to fashion models, to Olympians, were disclosed by an anonymous user and posted on the infamous web forum 4Chan.

Early news reports pointed to a widespread breach of iCloud, a cloud storage and cloud computing service from Apple, Inc. Cloud computing gained popularity in 2008, when the first open-source platform for deploying private clouds was created. Nowadays, many people choose to store information on clouds such as Dropbox for easier access to files across different devices like computers, laptops and smartphones. iCloud is also very popular; more than 320 million people have accounts that automatically store backup photos from iPhones.

Many people and news sources blamed Apple for lax security. However, according to a statement released by Apple, the compromised celebrity accounts were hacked into by using methods like phishing or correctly answering security questions to obtain passwords. The leak, Apple claimed, was not due to poor security on its part — it was the result of targeted attacks on individual accounts and had nothing to do with security architecture. In fact, the company concluded after a 40-hour investigation that there was no breach of its data servers.

Sophomore Beverly Hu thinks that Apple should not be under so much fire for the leaks: “The security system can’t be blamed if the user doesn’t take better precautions to make sure their private information is safe. You could always try to make a more complicated password or have better security question answers.”

And there are definitely steps you can take right now to protect your private photos (racy or otherwise) if you are one of the more than 320 million people who use iCloud. The first step you should take would be to just delete any private photos from the Cloud. This can be done by clicking “Photos” on your iPhone, hitting “Albums” and looking through “My Photo Stream” for any photos that you want to be kept private.

However, Apple automatically uploads the photos to iCloud, so in order to keep new pictures off of the Cloud, you will have to change your iCloud settings by going to “Settings,” selecting “iCloud,” clicking “Photos” and turning off “My Photo Stream” and “Photo Sharing.”

And finally, to secure your account, you could set up a two-step verification. With two-step verification, someone would have to enter a personalized recovery key or a code texted to your phone in order to access your account. To set it up, all you have to do is log onto your iCloud account, click “Account Settings,” select the link “Your Apple ID,” hit “Manage your Apple ID” and click “Password and Security” to chance your preferences. Apple will then send a special “Verification Key” that should be printed out and kept. From there on out, anytime anyone tries to access your account, Apple will text a verification code that will need to be entered in order to log into your iCloud account. If you do not have access to your phone, you can always type in the verification key. While this extra step can be somewhat of a hassle, it is always better to be safe than sorry.

As for the leak, the FBI is still looking into the situation, although it has not released an official statement that it is opening an investigation. Apple CEO Tim Cook also released a statement to the Wall Street Journal saying that Apple plans to beef up iCloud security measures to protect its users in the near future.