Quote:A California man impersonated an Apple customer support technician in a socially engineered email campaign that stole people’s iCloud passwords to break into accounts and collected upwards of 620,000 private photos and videos.
Hao Kuo Chi, 40, of La Puente, has agreed to plead guilty to four felonies, including conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer, in a scam that ultimately aimed to steal and share nude images of young women, according to court records and a report by the Los Angeles Times.
Chi admitted to marketing himself as a hacker-for-hire that could break into iCloud accounts using the moniker “icloudripper4you.” He then would dupe people into giving up their Apple IDs and passwords so he could steal photos from where they were stored in the cloud on Apple servers. “I don’t even know who was involved,” Chi told the LA Times, according to the report.
The case underscores the increased privacy risk people face when using cloud-based services from trusted partners like Apple to store personal images and other info online. With criminals socially-engineering phishing campaigns that seem more and more convincing, it’s becoming increasingly easy for clever threat actors to fool people into giving up credentials that put their hosted data at risk.
The case also raises new questions about a recent disclosure by Apple of its planned rollout of a feature aimed at detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) images stored in iCloud Photos, which already is being criticized by privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the security hole it opens up.
The foundation warned that the process of flagging CSAM images essentially narrows the definition of end-to-end encryption to allow client-side access — which essentially means Apple is building a backdoor into its data storage, the foundation said. This could open iCloud for more potential security risks, experts said.
Read more: California Man Hacked iCloud Accounts to Steal Nude Photos
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