(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Modern smartphones routinely save photos to the cloud because they often lack enough capacity for the huge number of photos that people take. Apple's iPhone by default saves photos to iCloud; Google's Android to its Google+ service; Microsoft's Windows Phone to its OneDrive service. Third-party services such as Dropbox also offer automated photo and data backups. "People take photos and zap them, but don't realise that they are being uploaded," Cluley told the Guardian. Ferguson agrees: "Deleted doesn't always mean deleted," he notes.
Those photos and videos can remain stored for years. If someone then gets hold of a user's email and password, they can re-download all the photos - and also any videos that might have been sent by email. For an Apple device, the photos can be downloaded on to a Mac or Windows PC, or any Apple device.
"Two-factor authentication" protects against such hacks because it requires anyone setting up a copy of an existing account on a new device to enter a code that is sent to the primary device - usually a phone. Without that, access is blocked. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all offer two-factor authentication on accounts, though it is not known how many, if any, of the affected celebrities used it.
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