A brazen group of hackers calling themselves the \u201cTurkish Crime Family\u201d claims to have more than half a million user names and passwords for a variety of Apple-based services, including mac.com, me.com and icloud.com. Unless their demands are met and the company pays a hefty $150,000, the group is threatening to erase everything in all of those user accounts.<\/p>\n
Since their demand was initially made, they\u2019ve followed up by saying that they have verified that more than 220 million of the login credentials work, and reiterated their payment demands.<\/p>\n
While Apple itself has not responded publicly to the threat, if you use any of the services mentioned above, know that hackers are notoriously unpredictable. Even if the company pays the fine, there is no guarantee that your data wouldn\u2019t be compromised anyway, just out of spite.<\/p>\n
Since there\u2019s no way of knowing which of the users accounts on those services have been impacted, your best course of action is to change your passwords immediately.<\/p>\n
Once more, this serves as a painful reminder about password security, because the sad reality is that too many people utilize the same password across multiple web properties for the sake of convenience.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re one of those people and your iCloud account\u2019s credentials have been stolen, you\u2019ve just inadvertently given the hackers your password to any other service you\u2019ve used that same password on. That could put your bank account, one or more of your credit cards and more at risk.<\/p>\n
Again, with no way to know whose accounts have been compromised and whose haven\u2019t, your best course of action if you use any of these services is to change your password immediately. If you\u2019re using the same password on multiple websites, change those as well, or consider yourself at risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A brazen group of hackers calling themselves the \u201cTurkish Crime Family\u201d claims to have more than half a million user names and passwords for a variety of Apple-based services, including mac.com, me.com and icloud.com. Unless their demands are met and the company pays a hefty $150,000, the group is threatening to erase everything in all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":25211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[34,30],"yoast_head":"\n