Jennifer Lawrence Leak Made Security Experts Warn Others

The warnings were made that there could be many more compromised iCloud accounts. This conclusion was made after examining file data from images stolen from Jennifer Lawrence and other stars.

One of the theories says that the pictures were collected by some hacker over a period of time and then were stolen from him by another hacker. Indeed, the earliest compromised pictures were dated December 2011, while the most recent was from August 2014. There was also reference to some Dropbox tutorial file in one of the hacked accounts, suggesting that the pictures originated from some cloud storage service.

But the recent posting to Github of an exploit against the well-known Find My iPhone app explained that a “brute-force” attack could be used to find out a password. This means that Apple’s service had some flaws which could have been exploited if the hackers had the victim’s email address.

It looks like the original hack has been done by “chaining” between different accounts: after gaining access to the first account, the hacker could access the address book and find new victims.

In the meantime, Apple hasn’t provided any comments on how many iCloud accounts had been hacked thus far. However, the company has come in for strong criticism over the lack of protection against “brute-force” attacks that could steal a password. The security experts believe that if iCloud account passwords could be brute forced, the problem is in the lack of rate limiting by Apple, not lack of crypto.

The other theories claim that the source of the pictures could be staff with the ability to access iCloud backups. In response, Apple explained in its support documents that all iCloud backups are encrypted. The company claimed that the customers’ data is protected from illegal access both during the transmission to the devices and when being stored in the cloud.

Thus far it is unclear how exactly hackers managed to break into iCloud accounts and steal sensitive data. Therefore, there is widespread confusion about the implications of the hack. Some security experts warn that it might be just the beginning. Given that the folders of images with thumbnails visible have been revealed, other celebrities can also suffer from the leak.