The blood, sweat and tears that go into building a reputation can all go to waste in an instant — especially once racy images are involved, as celebrities have learned this past month.
Thousands of fans took to Twitter after celebrities’ nude photographs were leaked due to an alleged Apple iCloud security breach.
The iCloud system allows users to sync email, photos and other data among Apple products.
At the beginning of September, Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, among others, had their photos allegedly stolen from their iCloud accounts. Gabrielle Union, Kim Kardashian and Rihanna fell prey to the same attacks.
“I’ve heard horror stories about iCloud, (with friends’) information being transferred to someone else’s computer,” said Johanna McCracken, a 20-year-old UF applied physiology and kinesiology sophomore. “Their pictures, their text messages — just personal things that you necessarily wouldn’t want anyone to see.”
In a statement released by Apple, the company said none of the cases investigated thus far have resulted from any breach from Apple’s systems, including iCloud or Find my iPhone.
David Stanton, the technical lead of Mobiquity and a visiting professor, said the images were probably obtained through a hacker who worked his or her way into Apple’s iCloud system by guessing security questions and email addresses of public figures without being locked out after several attempts.
“Breaking into iCloud is very hard,” he said, “and if you did, getting the information on a specific set of users would also be very hard, if not impossible.”
[A version of this story ran on page 9 on 10/2/2014]
