Apple “actively investigating” iCloud hack that leaked celebrity photos

By now you must have seen the numerous photos of female celebrities in compromising positions floating around on the internet. Some of these celebrities included the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton.

The subject of the photographs aside, it was being said that several of these photos were obtained by hacking into the iCloud account of these celebrities. As you may know, iCloud backs up the photos on your device automatically to the cloud, some thing most of these people were unaware of and thought deleted the photos from their device deleted them completely.

After the usual victim blaming happened, people suddenly realized most of this wouldn’t have happened if the hacker hadn’t gotten access to the iCloud servers. Apple is seemingly looking into the situation, and in a statement given to Recode it said “We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report.”

This issue does bring to light the importance of securing your content. Uploading sensitive and private information on the cloud is a no-no, no matter how secure they tell you it is. You should check if your device is backing up content in the background without your permission and disable it if necessary. If at all you must upload content there, enabling 2-step verification will prevent someone with your password or brute force attack methods to gain access to your account.

So make sure you check your accounts and enable 2-step verification wherever available.