PapayaSF and AnonTechie write in with 2 stories which seem to be linked. The first is the leak of nude and personal photographs of celebrities, and the second is perhaps the flaw that allowed someone to access the photographs.
Nude celebrities, bitcoins, and Apple: it's a story seemingly designed to stir up the entire internet. Scores of private photos of celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Kirsten Dunst, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead have been leaked (allegedly from Apple's iCloud), and posted on 4chan in exchange for bitcoins. A list of 100+ names has appeared, but pictures have not yet appeared for many names on the list (including Kate Bosworth, Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, and Kaley Cuoco). Victoria Justice claims the photos of her are fake. Twitter accounts are being shut down. The story is still developing, so grab your popcorn.
An alleged breach in Apple’s iCloud service may be to blame for countless leaks of private celebrity photos this week.
On Monday, a Python script emerged on Github (which we’re not linking to as there is evidence a fix by Apple is not fully rolled out) that appears to have allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find my iPhone service. Brute force attacks are where a malicious user uses a script to repeatedly guess passwords to attempt to discover the correct one.
The vulnerability allegedly discovered in the Find my iPhone service appears to have allowed attackers to use this method to guess passwords repeatedly without any sort of lockout or alert to the target. Once the password has been eventually matched, the attacker can then use it to access other iCloud functions freely.
(Score: 1) by looorg on Monday September 01 2014, @10:48PM
... knowing humans like I do, I'm going to guestimate that at least 75% of you are downloading the pics.
For research. Nothing else. I had to verify my previous claims about them being all, or at least mostly, blurry cellphone pics. I was right. After all I don't want to come of like some internet douche that don't know what he is talking about ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:11AM
Huh?
I don't know what you downloaded, but while they are mostly cellphone pics the quality is great. Modern iphones take great pictures. They aren't professionally lit or anything, but 95% of them are top quality for amateur shots.