Things to consider before saving nude pictures to the cloud

What sparks your interest more? The theft of 1.2 billion user names and passwords, or a few nude pictures of celebrities? Perhaps the nude pictures received more attention, but you should be concerned about both. This time the target was iCloud. The cloud storage built by Apple, available on Apple’s all the devices and computers. Highly convenient for content synchronization, application delivery, music storage and more, iCloud is an obvious choice for many users. According to Apple, iCloud gives you a ‘peace of mind’ when you loose your phone. Your content is safely and securely backed up to the iCloud and if you lose your iPhone, you can use the Find My iPhone app to either locate your phone or completely wipe any information to disable it.

It was the vulnerability in the Find My iPhone, which allowed hackers to write the application iBrute. iBrute was (since then Apple issued a patch for the Find My iPhone) able, with brute force, to find the password. After that, the hackers used the commercially available software EPPB, which allows you to download the entire content of ones iCloud account, provided that you have the Apple ID and password (obtained with iBrute).

Please, note the word ‘commercially’. This software is available for purchase by anybody. From government, to law enforcement, and of course to hackers.

Lesson learned: It is still important to use strong passwords. It is important to change them. It is important not to use the same password across multiple websites. And notably, only keep the pictures, which you don’t mind being seen on the Internet.

Apple is feeling the heat about this security issue. Due to the amount of news, Blackberry has published a few articles to remind you that they are still the safest platform when it comes to mobile computing. Perhaps it is time to move your nude pictures to Blackberry.