Failure of iCloud brings richer pickings for hackers

 “It's clear that someone has been able to obtain private pictures of celebrities. We can't tell at this point whether this is as a result of many individual attacks on the computers owned by the stars or whether it is the result of a single attack on Apple's iCloud” says Professor Mike Jackson from Birmingham City University.

“From a hacker's point of view a failure of iCloud brings richer pickings. There would be a lot of work involved in hacking into many individual machines whereas a security hole in iCloud would mean that millions of pieces of information would become available at once.

“Whenever you place information on a computer, that information becomes less secure. If you connect a computer to the Internet then the security risk grows. If you store information on a cloud service then you rely completely on security measures of the service provider. Once on the cloud it it’s these security measures which make the difference between privacy and the whole world being able to access your documents and pictures.”