You May Want To Reset Your iCloud Password… Just In Case What I’m About To Tell You Is True
Now, I will say up front that I wonder about the veracity of their claims, but I will put this out there just in case there’s something to them. Motherboard is reporting that a group calling itself the Turkish Crime Family is threatening to reset iCloud accounts and remote wipe iPhones if Apple doesn’t pay them by April 7th. What’s got the attention of many is that the group claims to have access to 300 million accounts:
The hackers, who identified themselves as ‘Turkish Crime Family’, demanded $75,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another increasingly popular crypto-currency, or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in exchange for deleting the alleged cache of data.
“I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing,” one of the hackers told Motherboard.
The hackers provided screenshots of alleged emails between the group and members of Apple’s security team. One also gave Motherboard access to an email account allegedly used to communicate with Apple.
Now, Apple has put it out there that they aren’t going to reward this group. That means that one of two things is going to happen:
A) Nothing. Because this group is bluffing.
B) A lot of Apple users are going to be really upset on April 7th.
My advice? This is a good time to look at your iCloud account in terms of how secure it is. Consider using a strong password that is distinct from other passwords that you have and enabling two factor authentication to ensure that you will not end up being pwned by this group. Assuming that their claims are true of course. We’ll find out if it is true on April 7th.
March 24, 2017 at 9:14 am
[…] may be a bit too early to blow of the so called Turkish Crime Family and their threat to cause digital harm to millions of iCloud users. I say that because ZDNet posted a story saying that it had received a set of 54 account […]