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posted by janrinok on Monday September 01 2014, @06:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-store-personal-photographs-on-an-internet-connected-device dept.

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.

Stars Exposed in Massive Nude Photo Leak

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.

This could be the Apple iCloud flaw that led to celebrity photos being leaked.

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.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2014/09/01/this-could-be-the-apple-icloud-flaw-that-led-to-celebrity-photos-being-leaked/

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/is-apples-icloud-safe-after-leak-of-jennifer-lawrence-and-other-celebrities-nude-photos-9703142.html

 
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  • (Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Tuesday September 02 2014, @11:02AM

    by gallondr00nk (392) on Tuesday September 02 2014, @11:02AM (#88446)

    Absolutely right, this is demystification - human beings in being human shocker. It cuts through the mythos and aura of being a celebrity, but we base entire newspapers around that now, so it's nothing new.

    There's an Ars article [arstechnica.com] that surprised me in just how preachy and puritanical it was. It takes the attitude that "well, you shouldn't take naked photos on your phone".

    Why? Because cloud services (unless you use something like Tarsnap) are inherently flawed? Surely that's a criticism of the services themselves, not how people use them.

    We expect celebrities to be perfect, and when they aren't it's sprawled across the gutter press for our own titillation or righteous indignation. The whole circus is pathetic.

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