Nude photo phishing: Scams a total of 620,000 photos from iCloud

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An American employee in Apple support is said to have stolen access data to several thousand iCloud accounts.

Two criteria: With or without nude photos
A man from Los Angeles has managed to steal access data to several thousand iCloud accounts. The intent has been to extract nude photos of women, according to court documents the Los Angeles Times has gained access to.

The perpetrator contacted the victims via Gmail accounts with the names "applebackupicloud" and "backupagenticloud" where he appeared as a support employee in Apple to access the victims' login data.

620,000 images
The 40-year-old also offered an "online service" where specific people's photos and videos could be downloaded from iCloud on request. According to the confession, he "hacked" 200 iCloud accounts on behalf of third parties. In total, the perpetrator has pleaded guilty to breaking into the iCloud accounts of over 300 people.

4700 emails with access data to iCloud
According to the FBI, the perpetrator had stored over 500,000 emails in the two Gmail accounts. Among them were 4700 emails with access data to iCloud.

The man had stored around 620,000 photos and 9,000 videos in a Dropbox account. These were organized according to two criteria: With or without nude photos.

Not the first case
The case has its roots several years back in time. The scam was discovered in 2018 after nude photos of a celebrity were published on pornographic websites. These originated from an iPhone backup in iCloud. Investigators were able to call in the perpetrator based on the IP address used to access the iCloud account. It is unclear whether all the photos were retrieved directly from iPhone backups or also from photos stored in iCloud.

Nude pictures of celebrities
Similar cases have been raised again and again in recent years. In 2014, "Celebgate" / "The Fappening" attracted international attention when nude photos of celebrities were published. Apple improved in the wake of the scandal the protection features of iCloud accounts.

It is unclear whether the accounts affected in the recent cases were protected by two-factor authentication. According to Apple, over 85 percent of iCloud users now secure their accounts with two-factor authentication.

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