A YouGov survey of more than 1,000 American consumers commissioned by security company Tresorit found that just over a third of them have taken steps to beef-up their online security in response to the iCloud hacks.

The most common response was to change passwords for stronger ones, with 13 percent creating different passwords for each online service and 6 percent enabling two-step verification …  expand full story

There are still many unknowns surrounding the leaked celebrity nudes. While Apple appears to have ruled out a theory that a Find My iPhone vulnerability allowed easy brute-force password attacks, some commentators are suggesting that the wording was sufficiently vague that this may indeed have been one route in. (Apple might be arguing that it’s not a breach if the correct password was required.)

But one thing does now appear clear: rather than a single hacker gaining wide access to iCloud, the photos were instead amassed over time by a number of different individuals likely using several different approaches. Phishing was doubtless one of them – some of the claimed emails from Apple are reasonably convincing to a non-techy person – but another was almost certainly to exploit one of the greatest weaknesses found in just about every online service, including iCloud: security questions.

[Update: Tim Cook has confirmed these were the two methods used] …

expand full story