On August 31, 2014, a collection of almost 200 private pictures of various celebrities—mostly consisting of females, and with many containing nudity, were posted on theimageboard 4chan, and later disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur, Reddit and Tumblr. The images were believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud. Apple later confirmed that the people responsible for the leak had obtained the images using a "very targeted attack" on the user names, passwords, and security questions associated with certain iCloud accounts.

The event was met with a varied reaction from the media and fellow celebrities, who felt that the distribution of the images was a major invasion of the privacy of their subjects. Some of the allegedly depicted subjects of the images also questioned their authenticity. The leak also prompted increased concern from analysts surrounding the privacy and security of cloud computing services such as iCloud—with a particular emphasis on their use to store sensitive, private information.

Response from Apple

"Apple Media Advisory

"Update to Celebrity Photo Investigation

"We wanted to provide an update to our investigation into the theft of photos of certain celebrities. When we learned of the theft, we were outraged and immediately mobilized Apple’s engineers to discover the source. Our customers’ privacy and security are of utmost importance to us. After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity 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. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud® or Find my iPhone. We are continuing to work with law enforcement to help identify the criminals involved.

"To protect against this type of attack, we advise all users to always use a strong password and enable two-step verification. Both of these are addressed on our website at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4232."

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