If you are anywhere on social media today (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), you may be wondering why suddenly everybody is talking about nude celebrity photos and nude selfies. This is because, apparently, there was a massive hacking of iCloud accounts – including those of celebrities who, apparently, had naked pictures of themselves stored on Apple’s iCloud servers.
Included in the leaked nude photos were Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Kirsten Dunst.
However, says Apple in a statement, “We have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud or Find My iPhone.”
In other words, says Apple, there was no breach of iCloud security, per se. Rather, individual accounts were hacked the good old fashioned way: by determining the usernames and passwords of the accounts.
Of course, none of this is anything new. Nearly ten years ago, a teenager talked about how he hacked Paris Hilton’s Sidekick account, from which he retrieved and posted pictures.
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What may be new is that, according to at least a few news sources, the investigation may now turn to child porn charges, as at least one of the images purports to be that of Olympic silver medallist McKayla Maroney, who was not yet eighteen when the photos were taken (photos which Maroney initially denied were authentic).
Back in social media land, people are falling into two camps: those who think that taking a nude selfie is questionable to start with, and those who think that those in the first camp miss the point: that the privacy and security of these celebrities was invaded.
We don’t pass judgement one way or the other on the practice of taking nude selfies, but we do think that anybody who stores them in any account on the Internet shows a stunning lack of clue about the privacy, security, and safety of their account.
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I have always questioned as why anyone ever was on social media — it has seldom seemed as if to be secure with hacking being rather common since “my space”–how could anyone trust the security of any of it; yet people do so. Someone ought to have calculated the know active total of social media accounts that have been reported to have hacked merely en mass. The security of social media has seemed to be very poor in the long run.
One as well ask why would anyone use Instagram or Facebook– as well as use trust anything to electronic media with any expectation of either privacy or security of data. As it is, pictures are never naked, but as with nudity only people are. On the internet anything,, and everyone, can be exposed; and I have thought that it has made in that fashion with snooping in mind from the its start.
Agreed about the internet. But it certainly is getting harder and harder to keep stuff out of the cloud. For instance, I couldn’t get my home PC to start up without a password (a step that seems unnecessary given the location) without using my Microsoft account (which I believe I pretty much had no choice but to get). I don’t *think* my stuff is flitting off into the cloud! but that has required a lot of active opting out on my part.
To answer the title question (which the article fails to actually answer), I talk about it on Ask Leo! because it’s an teachable moment for many people. A very important teachable moment.
Leo
http://askleo.com