Pippa Middleton’s Photos Stolen From iCloud – How to Prevent this from Happening to You

The British newspapers The Sun and Daily Mail have been offered private pictures of Pippa Middleton, apparently taken from her iCloud account. The police is investigating the matter and they apparently already made an arrest. Meanwhile we ask the question: How could this happen again?

There are means to protect your data. For example, by encrypting your data in the cloud with Boxcryptor. Pippa Middleton’s photo thief could have still accessed iCloud – we cannot do anything to keep this from happening. However, what he would have seen, when he tried to open the encrypted images is this:

View of an encrypted image in Dropbox.

Bummer! Poor data thief, all the work was for nothing.

Even if your name is not Pippa Middleton and you are not a person of public interest, you probably do not want to see private photos of yourself and your family in the hands of strangers, or wandering around the internet.

Cloud accounts can be hacked and as many examples from the past show, it is not so hard to figure out someone’s password and username. Attackers can use brute force, social engineering, or – since many people still use very simple passwords – guessing, to figure out your password.

Dear Pippa, and dear everyone who handles data that is sensitive or dear to your heart: Think about encrypting your data with Boxcryptor. Data thieves would not be able to view what they stole. Your privacy would be perfectly protected.

How to work with iCloud Drive and Boxcryptor

Encrypting your Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive account with Boxcryptor is very easy. Just install the program and get started. With iCloud, however, everything is a bit more complicated because of certain restrictions by Apple. It is still doable, just takes some more steps.

1. How to encrypt your iCloud Drive on Mac and PC

This is very simple. Just install iCloud Drive and Boxcryptor on your Mac or PC and add your iCloud Drive as the Boxcryptor location you want to encrypt. You can encrypt all your files and folders. After you did that everything that you safe to an encrypted folder in the future, will be encrypted automatically.

2. How to encrypt iCloud Drive and make all your data available on iOS and MacOS

Due to the fact that there is an iCloud Drive – a typical cloud provider – and an iCloud – where all your apps and their cloud space are managed by Apple; therefore also Apple Photos and your images – it is a little bit more complicated to set up your Apple clouds so you can access the data from Mac and iOS.

If you want to have your encrypted data available on all your devices you have to take the following steps:

1. Install Boxcryptor for iOS on your iPhone or iPad and install Boxcryptor for Mac on your MacBook.
2. Upload an encrypted file to your iCloud via Boxcryptor for iOS. Once you did this, Apple will create a Boxcryptor folder in iCloud Drive.
3. Now you can open iCloud Drive on your MacBook, and access the iCloud Boxcryptor folder that was created in iCloud Drive. You will find the encrypted file from your iOS there.
4. To make files from your MacBook available on your iPhone or iPad, you now have to open the Boxcryptor folder in iCloud Drive via Boxcryptor on your MacBook. Move or copy the encrypted files from your iCloud Drive to this folder, and you will have them available on macOS and iOS.

Are you confused now? We can understand that. However, this is the only way it works with the Apple clouds right now. We wrecked our brains quite a bit before we figured out what is going on and how it works.

But, as we mentioned above, when you only use iCloud Drive or iCloud on one Apple device, everything is very simple. What became perfectly clear, however, with this new photo theft incident, is that protecting your data is absolutely worthwhile. If you only want to encrypt one cloud on two devices, Boxcryptor is for free. So be smart and protect your cloud now.