About a couple of weeks ago, there was a breach of private photos by celebrities that made its way onto the internet. Many had initially believed that this is due to iCloud being hacked, although it turned out that it was just a very targeted attack that used brute force hacking tools to gain access to these celebrities’ accounts.
Regardless of who was at fault, it did highlight the fact that iCloud security is a bit lacking and it was an area that Apple’s CEO Tim Cook had promised to address. Well true to his word, it looks like the two-step authentication has been activated for those trying to access iCloud.com.
Basically if you have chosen to enable two-step authentication for your iCloud account (head on over to Apple’s website to find out how), logging into iCloud.com will only allow you to access the basic Find My iPhone feature. As you can see in the screenshot above, the other features have been locked and can only be unlocked when you authenticate yourself via a generated code that will be sent to a trusted device.
This makes it harder for hackers to access your emails and contacts even if they knew your Apple ID and password as they might not have access to the trusted device. According to the reports, it seems that this feature has since broken forensic tools and password breaker programs which were used by the hackers that stole the celebrity nude photos earlier this month.