When nude photos from one celebrity are leaked, it's news. But when private photos from more than 100 well-known figures find their way into the cybersphere – well then it's Internet News. Which is to say that no matter where you turn – from your friend's blog to your favorite trashy news site to the vaunted news desk at ABC – you're bound to read something about how Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and many others are very, very unlucky.
The disclosure of highly private information into the public sphere is invariably a sticky situation because as much as it prompts sympathy for those affected, it also rouses our perverse curiosity. Unfortunately, when it comes to a recent high-profile hack that saw the release of multitudes of nude celebrity photos, it's this latter human tendency that's largely superseded any reasonable display of discretion. For instance, celebrity blogger and supposed BFF to the stars Perez Hilton was far from circumspect when it came to linking to the images. It was only after he'd guided his readers to the trove of images that he seemed to grasp the infringement of privacy it involved and decided to not show the pictures. By then, of course, it was too late. After all, the circulation of the photos did not originate with Hilton, but instead an as-yet-unnamed hacker who has apparently been taking to popular image-sharing site 4Chan to air his grievances about not making enough money from the hack.
"Sure, I got $120 with my bitcoin address, but when you consider how much time was put into acquiring this stuff (i'm not the hacker, just a collector), and the money (i paid a lot via bitcoin as well to get certain sets when this stuff was being privately traded Friday/Saturday) I really didn't get close to what I was hoping," The Independent quotes the alleged hacker as saying on a 4Chan post.
The hacker's complaints about a small payday is perhaps the last thing to worry about when it comes to this incident. The more pertinent questions are these: Exactly how did this hack happen, and could it happen to the rest of us?
Amid scandal, public turns a skeptical eye to iCloud
Believe it or not, Jennifer Lawrence stores stuff on iCloud just like the rest of us, according to experts analyzing the leak. Vox reported that a very likely reason behind the exposure of the photos is a vulnerability in Apple's iCloud. The vulnerability reportedly centered around a glitch in Apple's "Find My Phone" app which would permit somebody an unlimited number of attempts to guess a user's password. What this means is that someone attempting to breach, say, Jennifer Lawrence's "Find My Phone" platform could have tried hundreds of password combinations without Apple's internal infrastructure sensing a potential imposter. More evidence for iCloud being the breach source comes from actress Kristen Dunst, who posted a tweet which not all that cryptically criticized the platform.
Not surprisingly, this incident has prompted widespread discussions about personal data security. After all, if a photo leak can happen to Kristen Dunst, it can happen to any of us. Regardless of the eventual outcome of the breach, what it calls attention to is the need for better passwords. Think of a password as something sacred. It shouldn't be something someone can guess with 10, 100 or even 1000 attempts. A password should be something that's literally impenetrable. We're not talking about (your pet's name) + (your childhood street) + (your favorite Ben and Jerry's flavor). We're talking about making your passwords many, many characters, with lots of randomly assigned numbers, symbols and capitalizations.
