Apple is facing some huge problems after it was alleged that the massive celebrity leak of over 300 nude images, which includes photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Selena Gomez, and others, came from the company's iCloud service. Because of this, the company is now investigating the matter, but there's no surety a suspect will be located.
The exploit that allowed someone to hack into iCloud and take hold of over 300 nude images of several celebrities, could have been due to a recent bug that was discovered by a user on the code-sharing site, GitHub that has a lot to do with Apple's Find My iPhone service.
The bug in question allowed the hacker to keep trying passwords until he/she found the correct one. We suspect this is what the hacker did to several celebrity iCloud accounts in order to find the raunchy images and leaked them online for the world to see.
Apple is at fault here because most online services and websites tend to lockdown an account if an incorrect password is entered too many times. This is able to prevent certain brute-force attacks, and has proven to work in the past, so we are surprised Apple did not implement this feature in the first place.
We understand that Apple managed to patch the bug on Monday, but by then it was too late as the "naked kittens" were already out of the bag.
There's a high chance that these celebrities had no idea that every image they took via their iPhone's were being uploaded to iCloud, so it wouldn't surprise us if someone chooses to sue Apple due to their incompetence.
"It is important for celebrities and the general public to remember that images and data no longer just reside on the device that captured it," said Ken Westin, security analyst at Tripwire.
"Although many cloud providers may encrypt the data communications between the device and the cloud, it does not mean that the image and data is encrypted when the data is at rest."
"If you can view the image in the cloud service, so can a hacker."
What happens now?
Well, folks can only move on from this, unless they choose to sue Apple. We expect that some celebs might even go as far as getting rid of their iPhones in favor of an Android or Windows Phone device. Furthermore, hopefully the celebs come to learn their lesson, and for the public at large, learn from the mistakes of these unfortunate individuals.
