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Hack exposes Apple blunder before iPhone launch

San Francisco - The recent leak of racy celebrity photos put Apple in the unusual position of having to mend its image just days before a product launch on 9 September.

Nude photos of Hollywood celebrities, including Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence, posted on internet forums by unknown hackers has sparked condemnation from stars and their publicists, and prompted an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In the wake of the breach, cyber security experts and mobile developers have called out inadequacies in Apple's and, more generally, cloud-services security. Thousands have taken to Twitter to express their frustrations with the company.

Some security experts faulted Apple for failing to make its devices and software easier to secure through two-factor authentication, which requires a separate verification code after users log in initially. The process requires several steps and more than rudimentary knowledge of a phone's workings.

Apple could also do more to advertise that option, they said. Most people do not bother with security measures because of the extra hassle, experts say, and the leading phone makers are partly to blame.

Targeted attacks

"Making things more private or secure by default instead of having 'security options' would go a long way. Most people won't take those options and they aren't necessarily advertised as available," said Matt Johansen, senior manager of the Threat Research Center at WhiteHat Security.

"Most sites with two-factor authentication, you need to go to some very obscure options menu, multiple-clicks deep."

To be sure, the inadequacies identified in Apple's cloud and mobile security ring true of other cloud or internet-storage services, experts said. Official and celebrity Twitter accounts for instance had been routinely hacked.

Apple said on Tuesday the hacks were the result of targeted attacks on accounts and not a direct breach of its systems. The company referred to such attempts as "all too common on the internet".

But the highly public affair remains potentially one of Apple's worst public crises in years. Speculation continues to spread on blogs about flaws in the iCloud service, which lets computer and mobile users store photos, documents and other data so they can be accessed from a plethora of devices they own.

Brandwatch, a company that analyses sentiment on social media, blogs and other sites, found that prior to the hack, Apple received very few negative mentions on Twitter.

But in the past three days, 17 000 mentions on Twitter were related to the security breach as of Tuesday afternoon. At least 7 600 of these tweets specifically mention Apple.

'Scary time'

Some of the negative words associated with mentions of Apple's iCloud service include "violation," "disgusting violation", "criminality", "failure", "glitch" and "disappointment".

Brandwatch spokesperson Dinah Alobeid said Brandwatch differentiates between negative and neutral tweets by analysing keywords. There were three times as many negative mentions as positive mentions related to the incident.

Apple has dealt with several high-profile public faux-pas in past years, including a maps service criticised for lacking important geographic detail and "Antennagate", when experts exposed how a flaw in the latest iPhone led to dropped calls. Depending on how the hacks went down, this incident could be as damaging to its reputation, if not more.

"This could be a scary time publicly for Apple," JD Sherry, vice president of cyber security provider Trend Micro wrote in a blogpost. "They haven't had many, Antennagate and Apple Maps come to mind, and this would most likely trump those."

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