Attackers Lock Up Apple Devices Through the 'Find My iPhone' Feature

Users of MacBooks and iPhones have recently reported on Twitter about a new wave of hacking attacks against Apple devices. The technology website MacRumors.com which was the first to spot the alarming posts claims that the new hack locks users out of their devices through the "Find My iPhone" feature available on iCloud. The affected users report in Twitter their accounts have been locked and they only see a message displayed on their devices that asks them to send 0.01 Bitcoins (equal to around $50) to a given e-mail address. After receiving the amount, the hackers promise to send the victim a six-digit passcode with which the user can unlock their device.

It looks like during these attacks the hackers have gained remote access to the victims' iCloud accounts and have then locked the devices with a passcode. For users who have lost their only device, Apple allows accessing their iCloud account without the two-factor authentication. Therefore, in such cases the attack is possible even if two-factor authentication is turned on as the attackers simply go to the "Find My iPhone" function and lock the device, bypassing thus the two-factor authentication.

Experts claim that the attackers have not breached Apple servers to acquire the usernames and passwords of the hacked accounts. More likely, they have breached other websites and have thus gained access to a list of usernames and passwords among which they have also found iCloud sign-in details. A possible source of this data could be the recent Equifax hack that exposed millions of users to the danger of having their usernames and passwords misused by cybercriminals. Affected from this attack are thus most people who tend to use the same account names, e-mail addresses, and passwords for a number of different accounts over the Internet.

Cybersecurity researchers advise users to use one of the many available applications for password management for the generation and storage of passwords for new accounts, and never to use the same login details for different accounts. Enabling two-factor authentication may also in most cases provide a higher level of protection against breaches. Also, specifically for Apple users, experts advise changing their Apple ID password in order to prevent such hacking attacks. A more drastic step would be to disable the "Find My iPhone", and respectively, the “Find My Mac” feature on your Apple device, yet this might not be a clever advice for most users.