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Apple insists that Turks cannot bring down its cloud

by on23 March 2017


But it would say that even if they could

Fruity tax-dodging cargo-cult Apple has reassured its legions of fans in the media that there is no way that Turkish hackers can bring down its entire operation.

Yesterday we ran a yarn where a bunch of Turkish hackers were blackmailing Apple for a comparatively small sum  by threatening to delete hundreds of millions of iCloud accounts.

Motherboard reported that a group calling itself the Turkish Crime Family was claiming to have stolen details for upwards of 300 million iCloud accounts in a bid to extort money from Apple. The group demanded $75,000 in either Bitcoin or fellow cryptocurrency Ethereum, or $100,000 of iTunes gift cards by April 7, or else it would reset iCloud accounts and remotely wipe Apple devices.

Apple has released an official statement saying that Apple has not been compromised and none of the company’s systems — including iCloud and Apple ID — had been breached, and that the alleged list of email addresses and passwords “appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services".

In other words, it is all someone else’s fault, only a small number of people have been affected, and none of them were Apple’s responsibility.

While we agree that it is incredibly unlikely to be a real hack and that the Turks are probably not going to switch Apple off, Apple uses this statement as a default when anything goes wrong.

One of the compromised third-party services Apple mentions in its statement is likely to be LinkedIn, with many of the addresses and passwords in the Turkish Crime Family’s list corresponding with ones stolen during a massive security breach of the business networking site in 2012.

Even if the information is new and legitimate, Apple says it’s watching iCloud closely, “actively monitoring to prevent unauthorised access to user accounts,” while also working with law enforcement to work out who was behind the threats.

“To protect against these type of attacks,” the company says, “we always recommend that users always use strong passwords, not use those same passwords across sites, and turn on two-factor authentication".

Still we will see on April 7.

Last modified on 23 March 2017
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