You may have heard that a hacker group calling themselves the Turkish Crime Family has threatened to lock 250 million users out of their Apple iCloud accounts if Apple doesn’t pay them $700,000 by April 7th. That’s scary! If you’re like me, you use your free iCloud account to sync addresses and notes between our devices. I don’t want anyone hacking into my account. Thankfully there are some simple precautions you can take to thwart any would be hackers.

Wired has a good article entitled How to Protect Your iCloud Account, Juuust in Case Those Hackers Aren’t Joking that explains what you need to do.

The main takeaways are:

  • change your password—especially if you use the same password for multiple accounts! —see the article for what makes a good password and an explanation of password managers.
  • set up Apple’s two-factor authentication. The article explains what it is and shows how to set it up.

There is some debate online as to whether or not these hackers can get to people’s iCloud accounts but either way it’s a good reminder that we can’t be complacent when it comes to passwords and the security of our accounts. We need to be proactive to ensure our accounts stay secure.

Images

Hacker by PeteLinforth Licensed under CC0 Public Domain

Computer Padlock by TheDigitalWay Licensed under CC0 Public Domain