iPhone and iPad users in Australian have been targeted by ransomware attacks where a hacker demands money to unlock their hijacked devices.
The hacker – identified as Oleg Pliss – cracked iCloud accounts and used the Find My iPhone function to lock the device as if it has been lost.
The device’s owner is then told they needed to pay $US100 before control of the device is handed back.
ESET security expert David Harley says there is no suggestion that Apple has been hacked but the likely cause is people using the same password across multiple accounts.
“It’s not exactly clear what has happened here – nor why the only people affected so far are Australians and New Zealanders,” he said.
“Based upon what is known, it is extremely unlikely that Apple itself has been hacked or suffered a vulnerability.
“A far more likely scenario would be that consumers have been targeted by exploiting password reuse – where malicious hackers obtain password and ID credentials in some type of data breach or phishing attack and then reuse them to gain access to other accounts.”
For victims of this attack there are ways to win control of your device again.
Restoring their device from an iTunes back-up on their computer has been successful for users who had a passcode lock on their device.
Another workaround has been outlined in the Apple Support Forum here.
One other solution is to turn off your Find My iPhone services with a two-step authentication for your Apple ID. Instructions on how to do that can be found here.
The best thing for users to do to prevent this happening to them is to use different passwords across all of their online accounts.
This hacker obtained account information from another database and decided to apply those usernames and passwords to the iCloud accounts where he was able to activate the Find My iPhone device lock.
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