iOS Internals · iCloud & Your Apple Account · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: Aunt Rosa's Busy Morning

Help a relative through an account attack, a leak and a used phone deal.

The case

Your Aunt Rosa calls, a little shaken. Here's her morning:

• At 8:10, her iPhone showed an Apple Account sign-in request from a city she has never visited. She tapped Don't Allow.
• At 8:15, a caller whose number showed as Apple Support said her account was under attack. He asked her to read out the code that was about to arrive so he could close the ticket. She hung up.
• Last week a shopping site emailed her about a data breach. She uses the same password there as for her Apple Account.
• She wants to keep her family photos in iCloud as private as possible, and she lives in the US.
• She's about to buy a used iPhone for her grandson from a local listing.

Start with the first event. A sign-in request like that only appears at a certain point in the sign-in process.

How did they get in

Rosa never shared her Apple Account password with anyone, and she's never typed it into a strange website. But that shopping site's breach leaked email addresses and passwords, and she used the same password in both places.

Criminals often take leaked lists like that one and try every pair on other popular sign-in pages, including Apple's, hoping the owner reused it.

Locking down her photos

You help Rosa change her Apple Account password to a new strong one stored in iCloud Keychain, and fix the shopping site too. Now she asks about her photos. Right now she uses Standard Data Protection.

She wants Photos end-to-end encrypted so not even Apple could read them. She also admits she forgets passwords a lot, and her nephew, who has an iPhone, offers to help if she ever gets locked out.

The used iPhone

Rosa meets the seller at a cafe. The iPhone looks great and the price is low. When she presses the side button, it opens straight to the Home Screen, full of the seller's apps and photos.

The seller says he's in a hurry. Pay me now and I'll reset it tonight, no problem, he says. Rosa texts you from the table to ask what she should do.