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Apple Devices Held For Ransom, Rumors Claim 40M iCloud Accounts Hacked; Apple-Related Forums Compromised (csoonline.com)
Steve Ragan, reporting for CSOOnline: Since February, a number of Apple users have reported locked devices displaying ransom demands written in Russian. Earlier this week, a security professional posted a message to a private email group requesting information related a possible compromise of at least 40 million iCloud accounts. Salted Hash started digging around on this story after the email came to our attention. In it, a list member questioned the others about a rumor concerning "rumblings of a massive (40 million) data breach at Apple." The message goes on to state that the alleged breach was conducted by a Russian actor, and vector "seems to be via iCloud to the 'locate device' feature, and is then locking the device and asking for money."In a separate report, the publication reports that three websites owned by Penton Technology -- MacForums.com, HotScripts.com, and WebHostingTalk.com -- have been compromised and their databases are now being sold on the Darknet. While nothing is confirmed, there is a possibility that some of the rumored 40M compromised Apple ID credentials may have come from these forums, or from LinkedIn's recent hack.
the publication reports that three websites owned by Penton Technology -- MacForums.com, HotScripts.com, and WebHostingTalk.com -- have been compromised and their databases are now being sold on the Darknet. While nothing is confirmed, there is a possibility that some of the rumored 40M compromised Apple ID credentials may have come from these forums, or from LinkedIn's recent hack.
People who post info on social media are fools!
Oh. Wait.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Who is responsible for devices getting hijacked? With PCs you can argue the end user is responsible for what is done with the machine. For more locked down devices is the manufacturer ultimately fully responsible for the function of the device?
There will be legal lawsuits for sure. Class action and individual.
A bigger question will be what view does the public take? Do they blame themselves of the manufacturer?
They've been doing it a lot more since the last buyout. I've had several deleted, none of which were even trolling.
These are not "compromised Apple ID credentials"... they are compromised email addresses and passwords for for OTHER mac/apple related websites... so if you're dumb enough to reuse your Apple ID email address and password on those sites they might match up.
I read this, thinking, "What hack?" cause I haven't had any issues at all. Then I realized the what actually happened. This sounds like the same thing that happened with the supposed hacking of Teamviewer. It was a matter of people reusing the same credentials in multiple locations, so as soon as one low-security place is compromised, you're still screwed in other places even if they have high security.
All I can say is that, today, you *have* to use either MFA, a personal password database, preferably both. I use 1password to store all my passwords, and Duo Security (free for personal use) for MFA. There are other options as well, such as Google Authenticate for MFA, or keypass for password storage.
1password is relatively expensive, but it's virtually hassle free and will let me sync my db across all my devices (Linux is read-only, unfortunately) and integrates with all major browsers. I don't use Keypass, but IIRC it works on all platforms including Linux, but it's browser plugins are lacking.
The most important aspect of password databases, is that they let you generate a very long, random password that is unique to the site you visit. You don't care what the password is, because you can just call it up from the database, but it makes your account essentially unhackable (provided the site you're accessing doesn't do something stupid like store the passwords in plain text).
This is 2016, not 1970. People can no longer afford to be naive about password management anymore. It would be nice if articles like these could take a couple moments out of their breathless handwaving to let people know that these options exist.
Do you have any proof? Screenshots, internet archive, etc? Anything at all?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
To be fair, "productive posters" are usually vitriolic idiots. Real slashdot discussions died about a decade ago.
Someone reset my Apple ID password on February 27th 2016 do you think it could be related?
Account has since been recovered and as far as I can tell nothing else was changed.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!