Dealing with iCloud extortion

Source: blog.cloudmark.com --- Thursday, March 30, 2017
A group of criminals is currently threatening to delete hundreds of millions of Apple iCloud accounts and lock users out of their devices unless Apple pays $70,000 ransom. Let’s take a look at how serious this threat really is (not very), and what both individual users and enterprises can do to prevent this sort of attack. For the individual user, it is important to use dual factor authentication (2FA) on all accounts that support it. If you have an iCloud account, turn on 2FA right now, before you read any more of this article. It only takes a few moments. The instructions are here . Also, if you ever used the same password on your iCloud account and any other account, it would be a good idea to change that password now. All done? OK, let’s continue. It’s clear that the attackers who call themselves the “Turkish Crime Family”, do have the credentials for some number of iCloud accounts, though it is probably far smaller than the hundreds of millions they are claiming. This was not a result of a data breach at Apple, but of other data breaches which may have exposed passwords which were reused on iCloud accounts using the same email address. (See //www.pcworld.com/article/3184476/security/leaked-icloud-credentials-obtained-from-third-parties-Apple-says.html ) The Turkish Crime Family provided ZDNet with a sample of 70,000 accounts. ZDNet attempted to contact the owners of a random sample of a hundred of these accounts. In many cas ...

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