At the very start of September a huge cache of celebrity nude pictures was leaked online. It was said that the leak happened due to an iCloud breach. Apple investigated and found that while there was no problem with iCloud itself, the leak had occurred because those celebrity accounts were specifically targeted by hackers. Nevertheless the company promised better iCloud security and now its following through on that commitment.
In an interview last week Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed some of the changes that the company is going to make to iCloud to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again even if accounts are targeted specifically. Among the announced changes were email alerts whenever someone tried logging into an iCloud account through an unknown device, tried restoring data to a new device or attempted a password change.
Some of the new changes have already been put in place. Apple has started sending email alerts whenever an iCloud account is accessed via a web browser. Even if that particular browser has been used to access iCloud before Apple is still going to send an alert.
Email alerts are a novel way to notify users about activity on their account that way they can quickly take action and shut things down before they go out of hand. Previously email alerts were only sent when the Apple ID was used to log into FaceTime or iMessage on a new device, not iCloud.
Apple has also said that it will ramp up awareness programs about the security features for iCloud, which includes two-step authentication, so that users can best know how to protect their data stored up in the cloud.
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