Hackers claiming to have hundreds of millions of iCloud credentials have threatened to wipe date from iPhones, iPads and Macs.
Hackers claiming to have hundreds of millions of iCloud credentials have threatened to wipe date from iPhones, iPads and Macs if Apple does not fork over $150,000 within two weeks.
“This group is known for getting accounts and credentials, they have gotten credentials in the past,” said Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development at Tripwire, of the purported hackers. “But whether they have that many… who knows? ”
There’s another reason for not panicking, Bailey said: People can quickly make their accounts more secure, assuming the criminals have only collected, not actually compromised the iCloud accounts by changing millions of passwords.
“The best thing to in this instance is to change the [iCloud account] password, especially if it’s a weak password,” said Bailey in an interview. Weak , in Bailey’s mind, was not necessarily simply short, but “one that was in the dictionary. ”
Hackers can brute-force passwords that consist of a single real-world word — one in the dictionary — by relying on, not surprisingly, lists of words from the dictionary.
Bailey reiterated the long-standing advice to compose passwords from numbers, letters and special characters, such as & and ^ .
Changing an iCloud account password is straight-forward; Apple spells out password reset on this page .
