Reported iCloud Hack Leaks Hundreds of Private Celebrity Photos

swinferno writes with news about the leak of hundreds of private celebrity photos over the weekend. Hundreds of revealing pictures of female celebrities were leaked overnight after being stolen from their private collections. Hunger Games actress Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and pop star Ariana Grande were among the celebrities apparently shown in the pictures, which were posted on infamous web forum 4chan. It's unclear how the images were obtained, but anonymous 4chan users said that they were taken from celebrities' iCloud accounts. The accounts are designed to allow iPhone, iPad, and Mac users to synchronize images, settings, calendar information, and other data between devices, but the service has been criticized for being unreliable and confusing. Earlier this year, Jennifer Lawrence herself complained about the service in an interview with MTV.

Comments

Apple's Culture works against them.

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for Apple for 9 years. I would never use iCloud for anything I needed to keep private.

Apple's own culture of secrecy works against them. You don't discuss what you are doing outside your immediate team. This means that you often don't know enough about what you are doing to understand where your code will be used. You are working from a design (or an API) specified by another team and you have to assume they have the complete picture. If they don't specify brute force protection for your code you must assume that they have a reason or they are using some other method.

The internal secrecy also results in multiple implementations of the same function, because each team knows its own code and doesn't see what others have already implemented or are working on. No doubt somebody in the organization thinks that the internal secrecy is worth the cost.