Inside The Underground iCloud Hacking Ring That Leaked Those Naked Celebrity Photos
As MailOnline reports, AnonIB was the anonymous porn-sharing forum where alleged leaker "OriginalGuy" first hinted at a collection of stolen celebrity photographs, and the site maintains a thriving marketplace where hackers openly sell their services.
Here's an ad on the site from a user looking to trade leaked celebrity photos:
This user advertises in both English and French to reach the most customers:
Experienced hackers charge higher prices:
Reliable iCloud hackers gain a reputation in the community, and clients will often choose to give one person all of their business. Of course, hacking online accounts for a living is dangerous business.
Frequent posters often disappear without warning:
If someone can't provide the password for an iCloud account, then hackers will have to use more inventive means. Some iCloud "rippers" choose to use specialist hacking software to gain access to an Apple account. Hacking an account with just an email address takes longer, and will cost more.
This is what password-hacking software looks like:
But if hackers don't have expensive specialist software, they can instead try and force access to an account using Apple's iForgot password reset tool:
Apple's security questions can prove tricky for the hackers to guess, so they pool their resources to come up with common methods for hijacking an account.
AnonIB iCloud hackers caution others learning the trade to be careful when trying to take over an account. They claim that it's often best to reset the password at night so that the password reset email can be read and deleted before the target is awake.
Once hackers have gained access to an iCloud account, they use specialist data retrieval tools to download all photos in bulk:
While reliable, the retrieval software can't reliably extract images from an iCloud account, and so hackers often take to anonIB to request help:
After downloading the stolen photos, the hacker will then send them to the client, who will either share them freely with the "Stolen Photos" community, or horde them for himself. The celebrity photo iCloud hack was likely not an individual hack, but a resident of anonIB who had built up a collection of celebrity photos using the iCloud hack exploit mentioned above, and chose to make them public.
A 'hole' 30 times Earth's size has spread across the sun, blasting solar winds that'll hit our planet by end of this week
A former Twitter engineer said they watched colleagues 'drop like flies' from a virtual meeting during Elon Musk's mass layoffs
Finland is offering free vacations for people to come and learn how to be happy after being named the happiest country in the world
Cabinet clears dearness allowance hike by 4%
India records 1,590 fresh COVID-19 cases, highest in 146 days
Paytm announces launch of its upgraded payments platform powered by 100% indigenous technology — a shining example of ‘Make in India’
Finance ministry clarifies on hike in STT on options trading
No draft of Digital India Bill published for public feedback or comments