Apple ‘actively investigating’ allegedly nude celebrity photo iClould hack

Apple has for the first time commented on the apparent iCloud hack that led to this week’s nude celebrity photo leak.

On Sunday night hundreds of pictures of celebrities such as The Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence appeared online, with claims on 4chan saying that they were obtained via a hack of Apple’s cloud computing network.

We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report,” Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris told Recode.

If it turns out Apple was compromised, it could cause the company to re-evaluate some of its data sharing features that are due to be announced next week at its iPhone 6 event.

TNW speculates that a ‘brute-force attack’ was used to compromise the accounts thanks to a vulnerability in Apple’s Find My iPhone service that allows an unlimited number of password attempts when trying to gain access.

Due to this, scripts can be used that effectively bombard the account with thousands of password combinations until the correct one is stumbled upon.