News of the dozens of female celebrities who had their cloud accounts hacked exploded online
last Sunday. Some were more exposed than others though. If this was a global hacking threat,
Apple and other companies would have alerted every single customer to change their passwords
but, they didn’t do this because they knew that these were very targeted attacks.
The named celebrities accounts were phished either by guessing their username and passwords
or by sending them a fake email asking the person to change their password letting the
hacker access these details. This is why Apple were silent for a few days
after the hacks took place. Apple said “We have discovered that certain celebrity accounts
were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions.”
This may be common knowledge to some of you, but we can never be too careful when protecting
ourselves from a security breach online. A pass phrase is basically a sequence of several
words stuck together that makes a really strong password. Something like house, chicken, blue,
kitchen. A passphrase is one of the strongest and easiest ways to protect yourself from
being hacked because you are using random words and not using known passwords like the
homekeys on your keyboard. For ultimate strength, a minimum of a 23 character password is recommended.
This is when you have two forms of password checked in via the web. The first one is your
usual password that you will enter when trying to get into a site. The second can be when
you enter this password you get an email or text with a second passcode to enter.
This is common for banks to do and Facebook has this option to prevent brute force. Brute
force is when someone is guessing your password over and over again until they get it right.
There are machines that do this thousands of times a minute until it cracks your code.
People don’t really know when they upload photos to the cloud, they stay there forever,
even if you have deleted them off your phone. So basically whatever you sync manually or
if your phone is set to auto upload won’t be erased until you go into your cloud account
and clear what you don’t want in there anymore. Each time you back up your phone, it will
back up all the photos and data that haven’t been stored in the past.
Anti-Malicious software, or malware for short is the essential software for preventing intruders
from gaining access to our files and sensitive information. Making sure you have downloaded
the latest anti-malware for your laptop and that it updates every few days is vital. Encrypting
your hard drive, recycling passwords, reviewing permissions giving to apps is also very good common practice.
The last one is quite simple really. Don’t share your passwords with others. Don’t
log onto other people’s computers, phones and tablets to log into your emails, online
accounts or clouds especially at internet cafes and other public places. Also, when
you log onto free wifi, it is never free, it comes at a price and they could hack your
data. Other obvious but easy ways are to not use
things like your date of birth, mother’s maiden name, or things that people could guess
or find out easily about you in both your password and more commonly your security question
that is used to reset your password. You can of course also turn your cloud off
by going into your phone or device’s settings and switching it off manually, not forgetting
to turn off auto cloud back up and always deleting and pictures in your photo stream
as well as camera album. On the whole, if you don’t want people to
see it, don’t put it out there. Taking nude photos is fine I guess, each to their own,
long distance relationships I get it but remember the internet is written in ink, not in pencil.
The one good thing about all of this now though is that cloud companies will now have stepped
up any loopholes so the public will probably never get hacked now. Try telling that to
Jennifer Laurence though. See ya.