Re/code:
Apple said it was “actively investigating” the violation of several of its iCloud accounts, in which revealing photos and videos of prominent Hollywood actresses were taken and posted all over the Web.
“We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.
To quote Penn Jillette, the magician: “Anyone has the right to take all the pictures they want, naked or otherwise and unless they want me to see them, I have no right to see them.”
Terrible situation, and shame on Apple if the reports of the exploit (that got patched last night) is the cause of this.
However, I hope those viewing the pictures who previously railed against the NSA for spying on Americans realize their own hypocrisy.
Sad thing is that it’s not isolated to Apple or iCloud. There are plenty of companies that are not rate-limiting among other things they should be doing. This wasn’t a surprise to me, the only thing I’m surprised is that it took this long for someone to exploit it in the first place.
Apple definitely should be smarter at this and be more proactive. The best thing Apple can do now is double up on their security efforts, share the code with the community (open source projects that Apple is involved with and uses in their OSes), and fund these projects if they don’t have it (think OpenSSL).
I’m not talking about the hacker. I’m spotlighting the hypocrisy of certain individuals who seek out (never mind take pleasure in viewing) the illicitly-obtained private pictures of individuals, yet are outraged at the invasion of privacy by the US government. If you can morally justify it because you’re not technically violating anybody’s civil rights, that’s great. But it’s still hypocrisy.
here’s my thing. If I was a hacker and I was going to even try to hack someone as big and badass as Apple I would make sure that I had a recording of the whole process to prove that I really did it and I’m not just talking that I did because Apple is huge in the media right now and I’d get tons of press.
So it’s interesting that there’s been zero proof by these alleged hackers of how they did it.
This one is a major leak however you want to whitewash it. It is result of lack of security culture. Security is like design you cannot but it as afterthought. This was a very idiotic failure. And it was in find my iPhone, worst place.
What makes this significant is that this is the vista moment. Normal people hear this loud and clear. They do not hear or care how this was possible.
After this one is really hard to sell health kit, house automation or more importantly mobile payments. How can you trust them after this ?
And for example Jim has been loud about facebooks dealing with data. Now deleted photos has been recovered. The control for iCloud has been poor, it has lost all my data so many times I do not trust it.
Okay it seems that accounts were hacked with quite limited number of passwords. But where did they get the addresses that might be even worse revelation.
But this is not out of the blue. Last big virus infection was on mac, iMessage has now spam problem. Secure connection (ssl) was broken with mac / iOS for 18 months. So there is systematic failure with security as a culture. And while this should have been addressed we as a community have been talking rubbish about who is copying who and all that stupid things.
its no more against the law to view leaked photos than it is to look at the check-out-line celebrity photos “stolen” by paparazzi. or to view Apple rumor sites and review the stolen iphone photos. are you decrying that as well? why not?
nope. the hacker = NSA, not the viewers.
“last big virus infection was on mac”? really? which virus was that?
It’s very suspicious the timing of this leak and all of the media coverage around it being Apple’s fault.
Wow. Stay in school kid.
What is suspicious about it as opposed to completely coincidental?
Suspicious because it came out right before what’s supposed to be one of Apple’s biggest announcements. And now that we’ve learned these pictures were acquired through years of work it’s even more suspicious. (As in some anti-Apple zealot, whether a person or company, has something to do with it.)
LOL Yeah – that’s tin foil hat territory.
Believe me, it’s completely coincidental.