“It rarely matters what happens in the tech business,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “Far too many alleged media analysts and reporters will devise a scheme to get Apple involved. And even when they appear to be involved, the truth may be different from it may seem at first glance.”
“So we have those predictable reports in the wake of the reported hacking of the accounts of a number of celebrities, and the posting of their private nude photos. It was all about Apple and iCloud,” Steinberg writes. “How could they possibly allow this unseemly behavior to happen? It couldn’t possibly be the fault of people who aren’t taking steps to protect their stuff. Ahead of what may the most important product intros in the company’s history, Tim Cook’s dynasty was in disarray.”
“Apple certainly took it all seriously, and went about investigating what happened. At the end of the day, though, they announced it was not about any lapse in iCloud security. It was about the people who don’t show appropriate caution in putting their stuff online,” Steinberg writes. “So this celebrity attack was against some entertainers, not the service. If they used Android or Windows Phone, with their own connected cloud services, it wouldn’t matter. They’d achieve the same results because the passwords were most likely insecure, and that’s the major problem. But the media wanted to make it about Apple.”
“Now I haven’t really gotten into the conspiracy theory about how all this came about, coincidentally, the week before Apple’s media event to launch the new iPhone and perhaps the iWatch and other products. Curious indeed!” Steniberg writes. “One of our readers suggested that Samsung might be behind this dirty trick. Perhaps, perhaps not… I wouldn’t care to suggest which company might be responsible for this sorry episode, or even that any Apple competitor was involved. The timing, however, is surely curious.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: iCloud the focus of a massive, orchestrated FUD campaign via the release of attention-grabbing naked celebrity photos that were reportedly collected over time, but finally just happened to be released en masse a few days before Apple is expected to announce a health-related wearable and a new mobile payments platform, both of which depend upon two of Apple’s hallmarks, security and privacy?
Stranger things have happened and continue to happen.
Yep it’s a FUD campaign.
Weeks before almost every major keynote apple has held there has been something that ‘just so happens coincidentally materialises’ before.
The cloud thing isn’t an apple problem – it’s a user common sense problem.
Apple isn’t responsible for people storing cached photos of celebrities.
It was either samescum or garggle behind it.
Fully agree. Samescum is probably number one suspect, giving their track record. Since it was a security attack, another suspect I thought of might be the banking conglomerates, who rival Samescum for underhanded methods. They may not want to see Apple dominating digital wallets and payments. Attack the perceived “security” of Apple and people will think twice about adopting Apple’s technology for their sensitive financial information… Just a thought.
Tim & Company will probably tout Apple’s security during their new product releases.
I can envision that the average viewer/listener may come away from the new product introduction more convinced that Apple is taking care of security better,than say, Samsung or Microsoft.
Yes. if I were Apple, I’d address thisand their security at the products launch. They have a chance to blow the whole thing out of the water.
That was an act of jealousy of those morons.
FUD for sure. However, there are no naked celebrity photos on any other device because no intelligent (or almost intelligent) celebrity would use and non-Apple device to take a nude photo of them self with. Unless they wanted it to get around. Then, grab a Samsung Android phone and get that nude selfie out there!
You used the words “celebrity” and “intelligent” in the same sentence. That’s funny.
probably cooked up by samsung, xiaomi, or perhaps the chinese government
Those are 3 pretty good guesses.
As sowecreate.com said, Guugle could also have been involved.
Arnold Ziffel. That’s funny. For the un-initiated, Arnold Ziffel is a very perceptive pig from the show Green Acres. From the Old Days.
Unalloyed evil.
Could’ve been far worse.
It could’ve happened *this* weekend, a day or two before the Sept 9 event. At least here we have a 1-week buffer so even though it’ll still be in people’s minds, the worst knee-jerk, emotional, reactionary responses are cleared from people’s systems.
Whether intentionally staged or not, media stooges have turned it into a smear campaign. Once respected for their vital contributions to an informed citizenry, these journalists and commentators have become lazy, stupid, and gleefully judgmental.
More than ever, it is vital to have a high-quality crap detector in order to make sense of this world.
Almost all of these folks are paid by Samsung, Google, and any other number of folks willing to pay for favorable treatment. What has happened is that so many of these “journalists and commentators” do not disclose that they are taking advertising or promotional fees from competitors. In the old print media days any honest / ethical journalist / commentator disclosed such relationships. In the full disclosure know it all internet of today, these facts are kept secret.
And they rarely if ever reveal their sources of “information” thus making it impossible to verify
I’m not sure having only Apple (The party most interested in it NOT being a breach) come out and say “it was not a breach” helps in dispelling the breach idea from the public mind.
Who are the people that win when these things occur timed at a launch? I would suggest it’s more mercenary than political. The consumer will buy an AAPL product is not going to rush out and buy a samsung or any other piece of rubbish because of this. I point my finger at those folks who make money from stock swings.
All this is assuming that it is, in fact, a planned exploit. I’m more likely to believe a coincidence. Or, more likely, those involved realized they could get more attention.
It’s the media idiots and their “expert” talking heads that blow this up.
What’s also important is that this isn’t a major breach of iCloud resulting in a ton of pictures being taken at once. Instead, this appears to be the work of a ring of hackers, who acquired the pictures one celebrity at a time, over a period of years. (Some of the photos being “leaked” weren’t even on the service at the time of the leak.) “The” hacker is just one guy who decided to try to cash in on his collection. So this is just a case of bad passwords, social engineering and phishing.
Someone tried to phish me for my Apple ID password just this week. It was a pretty good attempt, too. If I wasn’t paranoid about this kind of thing and thus hyper aware of the details (single misspelled word, odd choice of font), I might have fallen for it. What do you want to bet that’s how they got some of the celebrities’ passwords?
——RM
it sucked all the air out of the sony and samsung product launches – no one even knows they just showed new product lines.
I didn’t even know about those.
it is orchestrated by powerful vested parties and plenty of misdirection.
What should not be forgotten by Apple is that their security model is from the 80s mainframe days. I keep my fingers crossed with some innovation here to put others to shame.
From the 80’s? You must mean the whole username, password, and secret question schemes. Yes, very 1980’s. But fingerprint readers? That’s 21’s century, and it’s Apple that is making it happen. Once old iPhones without fingerprint readers are phased-out, it’s a whole new game. ‘Bout Time. Thank you Apple.
Actually, I don’t think anyone paid much attention to the Sony and Samsung product launches anyway.
As far as the photos, I asked my wife, who is planning to buy a new iPhone, what she thought about the photos stolen from iCloud and she hadn’t even heard of it. She gets her news from newspapers, not online sources.
I’m guessing 5, maybe 10 people won’t buy an iPhone 6 because of this story.
Who cares?
The nude leaks, followed by a big downgrade from one of the stock analysts, followed by the ludicrous reporting that the stock drop was caused by the pathetic Samsung announcement.
They are working hard these losers!.
NYT piling on with subcontractor labor violations. Of course, they bury down in the article that the subcontractor also does work for Sammy and others.
Apple gets criticized because Apple is successful. When Apple is suspected of being imperfect, it’s news, like when a man bites a dog.
Well, it’s probably more because unlike other companies Apple’s image is pushed as being ‘perfect’ thus providing the ‘WOW’ factor when it is reported that it isn’t perfect.
Not sure these folks are losers.
Bet they all have short positions on Apple.
More like Scam-Scum instead of Samsung.
Obama did it trying to save Blackberry at the last moment.
(Not really, but I am sure some WingNut has already posited it).
One problem I am having with this “breach”. The reports are about “photos targeting more than 100 U.S. and U.K. celebrities” over the weekend. Everyone is talking about the access to these passwords was by using the “forgot my password” process. That would be a huge amount of research on all the celebrities to be able to answer the two questions needed to reset the password. And all this just to get some nude photos? Really?
The breach has to be something much simpler. The hackers obtained a list of celebrity email accounts then did a brute force attack on their iTunes account. The cracker app would just spin through the emails and try the ten(?) most popular passwords and save off the successful hits. Now the manual labor comes in where the hackers view the photos in photo stream.
Yes, the photos maybe an embarrassment but I would be more concerned about other information saved to iCloud like my keychain. MDN keeps saying use keychain to store passwords but if that was breached then I would have the same security exposure as if I used 123456 for my bank password.
Ah another conspiracy, FUD campaign a great way to cover up the modern day jouranalistic incompetency.
Or reveal it.
Shit happens. More so to stupid people.