Leo Gillick
Due to a hack, a woman has lost access to all of her iCloud photos, making thousands of memories vanish into the ether.
Videos by Rare
Like many of us, Samantha from North Carolina likes to shoot photos. With phone and digital cameras, it’s easy as pie to fire off thousands of shots in a year. We like to document everything from a particularly delicious breakfast to our loved ones’ special days.
- However, each of these photos takes up a little digital space. So, in order that our devices don’t become full, we store most of them on the cloud. Whether it’s Google Drive, iCloud, or another cloud storage service, it’s where most of our digital data is stored.
- But the problem with this store-all solution is that it’s not in a physical place. It’s online and held securely with passwords. They are susceptible to being hacked, as this North Carolina woman found when her iCloud was accessed by someone she didn’t recognize.
When Samantha was notified that someone was trying to access her iCloud account, she clicked Reject. But that was just the beginning.
Locked Out
It was while working at home that Samantha first discovered something fishy was going on. A notification popped up informing her that someone in Jakarta, Indonesia, had attempted to access her account. She clicked the button to reject, but it was too late.
- She then received notifications that her password and username had been changed on iCloud. The hacker then set up multiple weekly recurring payments to gaming sites. Thankfully, she spotted these before they emptied her accounts.
No way back: Despite being able to stop the monetary loss, Samantha is now permanently locked out of her iCloud, along with years of photographic memories. Her photos aren’t stored on a solid drive and only exist in the now inaccessible iCloud.
- The hack has robbed her of many special moments she captured on camera, not realising they could be stolen with the click of a button. Many cloud services, such as Google, offer extensive security checks that can be used to regain access to lost drives.
- However, iCloud is notoriously difficult to regain access to when it’s locked out. Anyone with special memories or important work on cloud storage needs to set up multiple levels of security.
