Mobile Privacy, Security and Celebrities

There have been a number of recent stories with celebrities photos being leaked online, including Scarlet Johansson, Christine Hendricks, Olivia Munn and more. I was interviewed by Fox News regarding how celebrities can better protect themselves. The obvious answer is to not take the photos and store them on their devices or in the cloud in the first place.

The press repeatedly say that these celebrities phones were “hacked”, however it is rare that a phone is “hacked” and data on the device is compromised remotely. The cases we have seen so far are all cases where email accounts or cloud services have been accessed by guessing or brute forcing the passwords. It is not a good idea for celebrities to use free email accounts or cloud based services, they should hire IT and security professionals to setup secure emails and assist them with strategies to secure their devices.

Another more obvious way phones are compromised is if they are stolen, which I have a bit of experience with. There have been cases where laptops and phones were stolen that contained sensitive information even nude photos that were later posted online. If a mobile phone is stolen, the security measures in place on most mobile operating systems are trivial to circumvent once you have physical access to the device and a little time. Of course GadgetTrak Mobile Security is a solution to this, it allows users to remotely wipe all sensitive data on the device. The data that is backed up is also encrypted using the customer’s private key so that not even we have acess to it. Blackberry offers similar services as does Apple, however not the encrypted backup feature.