Apple has wrapped up a 40-hour investigation that began when news broke about leaked celeb photos, and it insists that iCloud is safe, reports the Verge. Hackers did indeed get access to the photos of Jennifer Lawrence and others, but those "accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords, and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet," says the Apple statement. "None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple's systems, including iCloud or Find My iPhone." Apple—which unveils new products on Sept. 9 and is most definitely not thrilled with this publicity—also encouraged everyone to start using a two-step verification system, which adds an additional step to the typical login procedure, notes CNET.
If Apple had forced all users to do this in the first place, it might have avoided this mess, writes Sam Biddle at Valleywag, who calls the Apple statement "slippery." True, iCloud wasn't breached "in the sense that the celebrity nude traders didn't break or manipulate Apple code," he writes, but the statement is "false and horribly misleading in the sense that they easily gamed Apple's system." The AP, meanwhile, reports that images are disappearing from sites such as Imgur and Reddit over apparent copyright complaints, but that it will be near impossible to scrub them from the Web entirely. (More Apple stories.)
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