Just as the notorious celebrity private photo hack on iCloud starts descending, another security leak is occasioned on Apple iCloud. The incident is reported by a security researcher and turned out to be quite worrisome enough to get on Apple users’ nerves.
Jeffrey Paul, a security researcher, noticed the incident last week. He reported that when he was upgrading Mac OS X on his Apple MacBook Pro, he detected plenty of his personal files were spotted in a new place, on Apple iCloud. The researcher thought that there was only one copy of his personal data which was with his own encrypted hard disk drive, which was a remote server that Apple gained access to. He was shocked to discover the traces of his personal files on Apple iCloud which echoed in his statements “This is unacceptable,” Paul stormed on his personal blog after a few days after the incident was spotted. This American based in Berlin vented on his blog stating that “Apple has taken local files on my computer not stored in iCloud and silently and without my permission uploaded them to their servers – across all applications, Apple and otherwise.”
Well, he was not the only one to be dismayed by Apple’s unauthorized access to Apple MacBook users’ files stored on the local hard disk drive; there are other victims who reported similar occurrences of data placement of Apple iCloud, unbeknown to them. One of them is Matthew D. Green, who is a Johns Hopkins University cryptographer had posted on his microblog post (Twitter) how he was taken aback when he discovered that many of his private notes were automatically saved on iCloud. Another famous cryptography expert, Bruce Schneier, had cited his frustration and fright on a blog post and called this automatic backup on iCloud as “both dangerous and poorly documented” by Apple.
The criticism has surely shattered the admiration and glory that Apple earned over the period recent weeks for launching a new type of mobile encryption solution. This new encryption is proven to be efficient in put a stop to government searches, including those police warrants. However, Police authorities are still capable of accessing data on cloud services; though Apple is working on it. Security experts have warned that the proprietary cloud services between MacBook devices and iPhone or other mobile devices. Similar to Apple, security researchers have cautioned to stay steer clear from other cloud services including Microsoft and Google that offer easily reachable cloud storage capacity.
