The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: iCloud backup

If you use iCloud to sync your Apple devices, your private data may be at risk of getting exposed or deleted by April 7th. It has been found that a mischievous group of hackers claiming to have access to over 300 million iCloud accounts is threatening Apple to remotely wipe data from those millions of Apple devices unless Apple pays it $75,000 in crypto-currency or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards. The hacking group, who identified themselves as 'Turkish Crime Family,' has demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another popular crypto-currency. Motherboard broke this story on Tuesday after a hacker claiming to represent the alleged hacking group shared screenshots of alleged emails between the group and Apple's security team with the publication. "I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing," the hacker told Motherboard. The screenshots o

Are you clicking selfies? That is fine and not any criminal act, but this act can land you in trouble — here's how! Almost three years after a wave of private photographs of celebrities leaked online, "The Fappening 2.0" appears to be underway with the circulation of alleged naked pictures of female celebrities, including Emma Watson and Amanda Seyfried on Reddit and 4chan. Back in 2014, anonymous hackers flooded the Internet with private photographs of major celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence , Kim Kardashian , Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst by hacking thousands of Apple's iCloud accounts . The Fappening hackers have since been sent to prison . The Fappening 2.0: It's Happening Again! However, in the latest leak, which has been heralded online as "The Fappening 2.0," the personal photographs of Amanda Seyfried and Emma Watson — ranging from regular selfies to explicitly sexual photos — have been leaking online since Tuesday night.

In the fight against encryption , Apple has positioned itself as a staunch defender of its user privacy by refusing the federal officials to provide encryption backdoors into its products, as well as implementing better encryption for its products. However, a new report from a security firm suggests Apple's online syncing service iCloud secretly stores logs of its users' private information for as long as four months — even when iCloud backup is switched off. Russian digital forensics firm Elcomsoft discovered that Apple's mobile devices automatically send its users' call history to the company's servers if iCloud is enabled, and stored that data for up to four months. And it turns out that there is no way for iCloud users to stop this phone call syncing service unless they completely disable the cloud synchronization feature. Elcomsoft, which sells software to extract data from Apple's iCloud backups and works with police and intelligence agencies,

If you are backing up your data using iCloud Backup , then you need you watch your steps NOW! In government fight against encryption, Apple has positioned itself as a staunch defender of its user privacy by refusing the federal officials to provide encryption backdoors into its products. When it comes to Apple's iMessage service, the company claims that it can't read messages sent between its devices because they use end-to-end encryption, which apparently means that only you and the intended recipient can read it. Moreover, in case, if the federal authorities ask Apple to hand over messages related to any of its users, there is nothing with Apple to offer them. "If the government laid a subpoena to get iMessages, we can't provide it," Apple CEO Tim Cook told Charlie Rose back in 2014. "It is encrypted, and we do not have a key." But Wait! There are still hundreds of Millions of Apple users whose data are stored on Apple'

At the beginning of the month, Apple was criticized for the security flaw in its iCloud file storage service that, according to multiple media outlets, allowed hackers to allegedly retrieve photos of a number of high-profile celebrities . And Now, the company's newly launched iOS 8 has been reportedly found vulnerable to another critical bug that is troubling Apple iOS 8 users. After the launch of iOS 8 , some minor bugs was reported in its operating system which was quickly fixed in Apple's iOS 8.0.1. But, the critical vulnerability discovered in iOS 8.0.1 seems to be deleting data stored in iCloud Drive without the user's permission. The bug was uncovered by MacRumors after its forum members complaint about the issue triggered by the option to " Reset All Settings ," which is typically supposed to reset your network settings to give your iOS device a clean slate to work with, but it turns out the feature is also deleting all your files from iCloud Drive.

A well known iPhone hacker and forensic scientist has unearthed a range of undocumented and hidden functions in Apple iOS mobile operating system that make it possible for a hacker to completely bypass the backup encryption on iOS devices and can steal large amounts of users' personal data without entering passwords or personal identification numbers. Data forensics expert named Jonathan Zdziarski has posted the slides ( PDF ) titled " Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices " showing his findings, from his talk at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference held in New York on Friday. Jonathan Zdziarski, better identified as the hacker " NerveGas " in the iPhone development community, worked as dev-team member on many of the early iOS jailbreaks and is also the author of five iOS-related O'Reilly books including " Hacking and Securing iOS Applications ." The results of his overall research on the iOS

iOS devices have a feature called ' Find My iPhone ', allows device owner to locate their stolen devices using linked Apple ID with iCloud Account. Unfortunately, a security flaw in iOS make it possible to turn off Find My iPhone without a password and enabled thieves to bypass the protection which makes the iPhone  untraceable if lost or stolen. To Set-Up ' Find My iPhone ' feature, users need to link their Apple ID with it and this will not only helps in locating the device but also gives permission to its user to remove all the data, drive direction to the lost device, lock the device by a passcode and displays a custom message on the locked screen. KILL 'Find My iPhone' WITHOUT APPLE PASSWORD Normally, disabling Find My iPhone requires Apple ID password, but according to the vulnerability reported by  Miguel Alvarado,  a thief can bypass all of this security feature without knowing your Apple account's password . In a video demons

Recently we aware you about the tricky phishing scam targeting Google Docs and Google Drive , a similar phishing scam has been detected by the researchers targeting Apple users to steal users' credentials. According to the researchers at Netcraft , a UK based security services company, the hackers have compromised the web server owned by the gaming company, Electronic Arts (EA) to host a phishing site which targets Apple ID Account holders, asking for users' Apple ID and password, along with their full name and date of birth and credit card details as well. " The phishing site attempts to trick a victim into submitting his Apple ID and password. It then presents a second form which asks the victim to verify his full name, card number, expiration date, verification code, date of birth, phone number, mother's maiden name, plus other details that would be useful to a  fraudsters , " wrote the researchers in a blog post. The Hackers compromised the EA Games server by exp