You might remember that Australian iPhone and iPad users had their iDevices held for ransom by an unknown group of individuals. Thankfully for iDevice users everywhere, those individuals are now under arrest:
The hackers – aged 17 and 23 – were detained in the course of “operational activities” by the Russian Interior Ministry, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said. They are both residents of the Southern Administrative District of Moscow and one has already been tried before, it said.
According to Russian media outlet MKRU, the hackers were caught by CCTV when they withdrew victims’ ransom money from an ATM.
MKRU added that the 23-year-old, “Ivan”, was “madly keen on computers and hacking”.
“The young man never studied or worked and was always looking for easy ways to make money,” MKRU said of Ivan.
The unnamed 17-year-old was reportedly his accomplice.
While this is good, this does not change the advice that I previously gave you. Apple has a system called two factor authentication. Besides having a strong password, you should enable this feature to protect yourself from having your iDevice iJacked. I say that because all these two individuals did is take advantage of weak passwords on their iCloud accounts. That means that anybody can do this. Two factor authentication reduces the number of people who could iJack your device to people who are actually hackers. Which these two were not.
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This entry was posted on June 9, 2014 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Hackers Involved In Holding iDevices For Ransom Arrested
You might remember that Australian iPhone and iPad users had their iDevices held for ransom by an unknown group of individuals. Thankfully for iDevice users everywhere, those individuals are now under arrest:
The hackers – aged 17 and 23 – were detained in the course of “operational activities” by the Russian Interior Ministry, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said. They are both residents of the Southern Administrative District of Moscow and one has already been tried before, it said.
According to Russian media outlet MKRU, the hackers were caught by CCTV when they withdrew victims’ ransom money from an ATM.
MKRU added that the 23-year-old, “Ivan”, was “madly keen on computers and hacking”.
“The young man never studied or worked and was always looking for easy ways to make money,” MKRU said of Ivan.
The unnamed 17-year-old was reportedly his accomplice.
While this is good, this does not change the advice that I previously gave you. Apple has a system called two factor authentication. Besides having a strong password, you should enable this feature to protect yourself from having your iDevice iJacked. I say that because all these two individuals did is take advantage of weak passwords on their iCloud accounts. That means that anybody can do this. Two factor authentication reduces the number of people who could iJack your device to people who are actually hackers. Which these two were not.
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This entry was posted on June 9, 2014 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.