Scott Greene reports that The Family claims it will hack the some 600 million Apple iCloud accounts on April 7, 2017. That is, unless Apple pays a ransom. The Family claims it will perform a factory reset and therefore wipe hundreds of millions of iProducts by hacking into their iCloud accounts. Prior to this threat, The Family had never been heard of. The group Twitter account announced on March 21, 2017 that 200 Million iCloud accounts will be factory reset on April 7 2017. On March 22, the group increased the number to 627 million. It went on to say ... we are convinced it will keep growing until 7 April 2017.
The Turkish Crime Family as asked Apple to pay a ransom of $75,000 in either Bitcoin or Ethereum. It also offered to allow Apple to pay $100,000 in iTunes gift cards. In return, The Family will de1ete the iCloud user data it claims to possess.
The threat appears to be somewhat credible. ZDNET, a CBS Interactive company based in San Francisco, California, received a sample of the data that The Family claims to have and has verified that at least some of the sample data contains valid iCloud account usernames and passwords.
So what should you do if you have an iDevice and an iCloud account? First reset your password. This will likely prevent The Family from accessing your account. Using a strong password is encouraged.
You can take a further step to secure your account by turning on Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).
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