How To Protect Your iCloud Photos From Hackers

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Most of you are probably aware that many popular celebrities’ photos have been leaked online by a hacker after a massive iCloud breach on Sunday night. These celebrities include Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Ariana Grande and many others who have saved their very personal photos on their Apple devices (which were not meant to be seen by anyone else).

The problem is that these celebrities thought that their personal pictures would always remain personal, but unfortunately, they did not. What many don’t realize is that they may have already configured their Apple devices to automatically back up all of their photos on iCloud and then forget that it’s running in the background, uploading every picture to the iCloud servers.

Now if hackers somehow gain access to your iCloud account, then they can easily download all your pictures without gaining access to your iPhone or iPad. Right now Apple hasn’t said much on this matter, but some reports from ZDNet suggest that the company might have already fixed a security exploit that could have allowed hackers to obtain iCloud passwords from those celebrities’ accounts.

How to disable photo stream to stay protected from iCloud breach

Now if you want to stay protected from such a hack, then you can disable Photo Stream. If you’ve enabled Photo Stream, then you’ll also see a “My Photo Stream” album. This means that these photos are uploaded to Apple’s iCloud servers. Here’s how you can disable this feature and live a carefree life.

Go to the Settings app on your iDevice and then tap on “iCloud.” Tap on “Photos” (or “Photo Stream” in iOS 6), and then switch off the Photo Stream feature. Also note that if you want those photos to be safe, then you should back it up somewhere else, for example, in some other cloud storage service such as Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

iCloud Photo Stream

You will need to manually turn off this feature on all of your Apple devices to stay protected.

Another small tip is to change your iCloud password to something really strong. It should be a combination of alphanumeric characters, as well as special characters (like @#^*). Also Apple requires users to create a password with a minimum of eight characters, including a number and both uppercase and lowercase letters.

To change your password, visit AppleID, click on “Manage your Apple ID” > “Password and Security” > “Change Password.”

Once you do this, you also need to change the password on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. To do this, go to the Settings app, tap on iCloud and then tap on your iCloud account. Enter the new password there.

So that’s it. Go ahead and protect your iCloud account from hacks using these tips.

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