A couple of days ago, Apple was the victim of another round of hacking attacks targeting its iCloud service. As strange as it may sound, the attacks were apparently organized by the Chinese government. This is according to a censorship monitoring group that goes by the name of GreatFire, who says that China was collecting data from iCloud users. Earlier today, Apple confirmed the attacks and said that the situation is being taken seriously and precautions are already in place. “We’re aware of intermittent organized network attacks using insecure certificates to obtain user information, and we take this very seriously,” the company said.
Apple also mentioned that the iCloud servers were not compromised by these attacks and iCloud sign ins from iOS devices or Macs running OS X Yosemite will not be affected. No further details are available at this time, so we don’t know if the Chinese government is really responsible as Apple didn’t reveal the identity of the attackers. While Apple seems unwilling to blame anyone at the moment, the same can not be said about GreatFire. The group continues to point its finger at China and claims that the attacks are related to the ongoing Hong Kong protests.
The country’s government already took a number of steps in order to ensure that pictures or videos of the protests don’t reach mainland China. Instagram and other social media have been blocked to help with this endeavor, although these methods were arguably not very effective. Now the Chinese government is presumably trying to get rid of the pictures and videos that already made their way to the iCloud. Apple says that users should not enter their log in credentials if they get an invalid certificate warning in their browser while visiting iCloud.
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