News has broken today that Kylie Jenner has fallen victim to an apparent ‘snapchat’ hack, which has resulted in the hacker threatening to post nude pictures of the star online:
This news comes soon after Modern Family star Sarah Hyland had her own private photos stolen and posted online over the weekend. In response to this, Mark James, Security Specialist at ESET has offered some insight.
Mark James, Security Specialist at ESET:
“Of course the problem here is the term “Hack”. If it is indeed a hack, then someone has taken great efforts to use their expertise and knowledge to break into an incredibly secure messaging or cloud storage platform and thus more photos from the thousands of celebs that use these platforms are sure to follow. More likely is the fact that either a targeted phishing attack or password reuse is the cause; either way, the term should be “theft” not “hack”. Finding or acquiring someone’s username and password then trying to log into the various platforms until successful with the intention of stealing data is not hacking by any means.
But the damage is no less severe. Of course we always recommend to never store any of your private photos online. In an ideal world you should not have to worry about others stealing your intimate snaps, but being in the public eye has its downsides (that does not make it right of course! ).
If anything they need to use extra levels of security. For instance, secure unique passwords that are never reused, being very careful who share logins are shared with, and if possible using some kind of two or multi factor authentication to protect those accounts. Once those digital photos or videos have been stolen they can never be retrieved or recovered- sometimes with catastrophic consequences.”
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