By Edwin Kee
Life in the cloud is not all peachy keen it seems, as a handful of iCloud accounts have been compromised despite being protected by secure, randomly generated passwords. This has led to speculation by the iCloud community in general that a security breach might have happened on Apple’s servers. According to one of those who were affected, known by the username “solargaze,” their Me.com e-mail addresses were already hacked into, and those addresses had started to fire away spam messages yesterday. Here is what one of the affected mentioned, “I never use my @me email for anything, and I guarantee someone didn’t break into the account by guessing my password (or brute force methods) — it’s a pseudoly randomly generated string of 15 numbers, letters (upper and lower case) and symbols (I worked in IT for many years and am perhaps overly zealous about password security, which makes memorization a real pain). I’m worried that Apple’s iCloud servers themselves got hacked, as I see there are a few other people on the forums who are reporting that their account was used for spam in the last few hours.”What do you think of the whole situation? Was iCloud really hacked, and if so, why did Apple remain mum on the situation? It seems that the spam messages were forwarded to contacts that were synchronized using iCloud. Those on your Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird contact lists seemed immune from this alleged threat. Hopefully whatever alleged breach will be patched up sooner rather than later by Apple, and an apology would be nice at this juncture.
