Apple Improving iCloud Security Amid Denials of Blame for Recent Hacks

Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you probably heard that last weekend some lousy crumb-bums hacked into the iCloud accounts of several celebrities and leaked sensitive photos they had stored there all over the Internet. Despite the fact that Apple denies any fault on its part for the breach, CEO Tim Cook said today that the company will make improvements to the iCloud service’s security.

The news comes by way of the Wall Street Journal, which paraphrases Cook’s comments to the rest of us. The new security enhancements will include email and push notifications “when someone tries to change an account password, restore iCloud data to a new device, or when a device logs into an account for the first time.” In all, Apple will make sure that you know what’s going on when something or someone accesses your account in any way, shape, or form.

Said Cook:

“When I step back from this terrible scenario that happened and say what more could we have done, I think about the awareness piece. I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That’s not really an engineering thing.”

In short, Cook says that the fault lies in humanity’s need to look at naked photos of beautiful celebrities, and not so much Apple’s iCloud service. And you know what? He’s kind of right, but here we are anyway.

Cook said that the new measures will go into effect in the next two weeks.

“We want to do everything we can do to protect our customers, because we are as outraged if not more so than they are,” he added.

As ever, the best way to avoid having your data end up in the hands of someone else is to avoid putting sensitive information in the cloud. There’s no way to stop every attack. But if you’re judicious in what does and doesn’t make its way online, you’re less likely to be breached in this way. That said, let’s all remember that even though the victims of these hacks are celebrities, they are still people. They have all the same rights to privacy and security as the rest of us. Hopefully Apple’s changes to iCloud will prevent future breaches…for a while.

[Source: WSJ]