Publicly Private

On August 31, 2014, hundreds of nude photographs of famous celebrities started showing up on websites such as 4chan, Imgur and Reddit. The subreddit dedicated to the leaks was one of the fastest growing trends in Reddit history before it was banned. These images were all revealed to be leaked out of the celebrities’ iCloud accounts.But what is iCloud? If you have an iPhone or an iPad, you have iCloud. For those who don’t know, iCloud is a back up system that stores mail, contacts, photos and more on a system that you can access wherever you are, whenever you want to, and you don’t even need a physical computer.It was revealed on several online articles that there is a pretty simple way to hack into someone’s iCloud and get his or her information, pictures and anything else on it. It is so simple that the person doing the hacking does not even need to be an advanced hacker.An article in the Washington Post explained that this simple hacking trick can be done in under three minutes thanks to the use of "security questions." The security questions are what weakens a password-protected site. Pages like Facebook use associated emails in order to change passwords. Some sites have two-factor verification which require the person to have a physical phone in order to change the password of the account. However, there are some sites, including iCloud, where one can gain access to an account simply by answering some questions that can easily be guessed or researched on social media.Once this is done, the "hacker" can browse the person’s pictures, reset his or her password, and even buy music and apps from the person’s account. Hackers have managed to even recover pictures that were deleted years ago. iCloud, however, is not the only site that can easily be hacked; people who did not set up a two-step verification system for their Gmail account are at the risk of being hacked by people who know a few things about them, and all the hacker must do is answer some simple questions.These cases of hacking are a wake up call for anyone who uses the Internet. First of all, we must all be careful of what we do with our data especially if sending it to the cloud. Secondly, it has been strongly suggested by Apple that users enable a two-step verification for their accounts which can help prevent people from accessing your account even if they know your password. One can also choose more difficult questions and even answer them with totally random answers (such as "AbDcF4r1") that people trying to hack into the account wouldn’t be able to guess or look up online.For now, we’re unfortunately stuck with this system and must bare with it until companies find better ways of keeping all of their clients’ information private. Yet we must all learn from these incidents that we are responsible for our own data and must do all we can to keep it private.