Analysis of the embedded EXIF data (information about where and how the picture was taken that is frequently appended to digital photo images) included in one of the leaked images shows it was taken a few weeks ago, well within Photo Stream's limit of 30 days before images are deleted.

Do it yourself.'Īfter discovering the iCloud account of a celebrity, it's trivially easy to access their online photo backup through Apple's Photo Stream utility and iCloud photo backups. Jennifer Lawrence is known to use iCloud after she let slip in a red carpet interview with MTV this year that she frequently has trouble with the service, remarking 'My iCloud keeps telling me to back it up, and I'm like, I don't know how to back you up. UPDATE: Apple has patched a security flaw in iCloud that could have been used to hack celebrity accounts.

Instead the photos most likely emerged due to a type of hacking known as 'social engineering.' This exploit works by learning which online services your target uses, and then compiling as much data on them as possible before using that data to either spoof access, or to simply use their email address and a guessed password to log in to their account. It's unlikely that someone has broken into Apple's iCloud service. The original leaker behind the celebrity photos claimed that they accessed the images using the iCloud accounts of various celebrities. But how likely is it that Apple's encrypted cloud service led to the mass hack, and what are the other ways that the nude photos could have emerged? iCloud In the original 4chan thread where the hacker first posted the images, the consensus was that Apple's iCloud service was to blame. After naked photos of about 20 celebrities leaked online last night, the internet scrambled to try and figure out exactly how the images became public.

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