14 DAY TRIAL // This hopefully is no longer a mystery for CNN, as the online community gave an answer to the question after the television channel disclosed their conundrum on YouTube.
“He may - and I'm sure we're going to be able to get some more confirmation on this as the hours and minutes go on - he may have been just a system administrator who knew his way around and how to hack things,” he said.
He goes on to explain how the celeb photo leak incident could have occurred, and how it may not have been a big effort, since knowing the security loophole, the hacker only had to run a password app to check if the iCloud accounts of the targets could be broken into.
By the way, if the account password is “password,” he recommends changing the “s” to a dollar sign – great way to give viewers a false sense of security.
“You have to have passwords that aren't words,” and motivates this by saying that “this guy who got through [Mr. Chan, no doubt about it] literally ran a program that just runs through every word in the dictionary and one of those will end up being your password.”
Well, rumor has it that cybercriminals do not rely on Oxford or Merriam-Webster for their “password app” and build their own dictionary, with entries that combine all sorts of characters, dollar signs included.
Aside from the vocal input, the hand gestures used by the journalists in the video (see below) say everything with the utmost clarity; some may even understand what it is all about by watching the video on mute.
However, one thing is clear: creating file backups in the cloud is not exactly the safest route. The news presenter offers some input about this too.
“And that’s what I had heard about some of these pictures that had been deleted, but because they were put out there, they were still floating out there in the ether,” she said; because that’s what cloud services do once the user deletes a file: they continue to store it and keep it riding the Interwebz until haxors manage to reach it and leak it online.
The video, which can be viewed below this article, concludes with an awesome piece of information from Larson, “hacking is against the law.”
Twitterers are confident that Mr. Chan will get caught, eventually, unless he turns out to be an image board website, where users post anonymously.
CNN video on the celeb photo hack:
We'll get you Mr. Chan! pic.twitter.com/cVwcdc4HMJ
— brad esposito (@braddybb) September 2, 2014 The answer from the community:
