iPhones, iPads reportedly hacked using Apple's 'Find my iPhone'

iPhones, iPads and Mac users in Australia are waking up to ransom messages on their devices which says their phones have been remotely locked by a hacker who calls himself Oleg Pliss reported the Age.   Cases of ‘iJacking’ were reported across Australia from Queensland to New South Wales to Western Australia, South Australia and the state of Victoria. Victims woke up to loud lost iPhone messages that went on to say that Oleg Pliss had hacked their phone. The message also instructed the owners to send money to a PayPal account to get their device back. Users who had two-factor authentication turned on were fortunate enough to avoid this.   It is still unclear how the hacker managed to tap in to so many iPhones remotely. According to The Verge, there is a possibility that a list of email addresses and passwords associated with the accounts were leaked. With the recent eBay hacking case, and the major Heartbleed threat, Internet security has come under a lot of scrutiny and this latest hack will no doubt add more speculation as to how reliable online services really are.   Troy Hunt, an IT security expert told The Age: “It’s quite possible this is occurring by exploiting password reuse. Regardless of how difficult someone believes a password is to guess, if it’s been compromised in another service and exposed in an unencrypted fashion, then it puts every other service where it has been reused at risk. Of course it also suggests that two-factor authentication was likely not used as the password alone wouldn’t have granted the attacker access to the iCloud account.”   Australian carriers have by and large passed on the buck to Apple over this issue, with affected users reporting no help forthcoming from telcos.