Leslie Jones Fighting More than Ghosts with a Hacked Cloud
Can you really keep hackers out of your cloud? Actress Leslie Jones just had her cloud hacked and woke up to see her Tumblr website filled with her own compromising pictures, including a video of Harambe the gorilla killed in a Cincinnati zoo. She’s the latest celebrity to fall victim to hackers similar to what happened to Jennifer Lawrence, Kaley Cuoco and Kate Upton. Anyone who wants to see her curves are out of luck as the site has been taken down and the case subject to federal investigation.
Leslie Jones’ NSFW pictures came from her own iCloud account which was hacked and then the pictures were posted to her Tumblr site. It seems that despite the previous iCloud incident involving Jennifer Lawrence, Apple may not have beefed their security all that much, even flaunting their security against the FBI, which the bureau managed to hack through anyway. Tumblr may have a similar case on its hands, and it seems that consumer websites are not very secure. Apple and Tumblr could argue that the actresses used weak passwords, and the actresses didn’t get the memo on secure passwords and two-step authentication.
It’s just a terrifying time to have a web presence and become a target. There used to be a time that to be hacked, hackers would go through a string of IP addresses and try to get in them just for kicks, recognition, profit or maybe even make a statement in protest. Now, all a hacker needs is a name, tied to a website or email account, a malicious motivation and there goes the neighborhood. Unfortunately for Leslie Jones, she became a target of a hate campaign partially because of her participation in an unwanted reboot of a beloved fan franchise, Ghostbusters. Her loud, outspoken personality and maybe even her race contributed to her being singled out from her fellow female cast members.
Hollywood is currently suffering a drought of ideas resulting in unwanted remakes of old popular franchises resulting in poor performances and box office returns. The “Robocop” remake was a dismal failure; the “Fantastic Four” remake was a bomb and the cult classic IT remake could possibly fail due to negative views of its Shakespearean rendition of Pennywise the clown. Speaking of clowns, ghosts and remakes, Hollywood plans a remake of Beetlejuice and hopefully they won’t push through with “Big Trouble in Little China.” What’s worse, the “Ghostbusters” remake has barely made even and is likely not getting a sequel potentially killing the franchise. Potentially, but because of all the attention the Ghostbusters is getting, there might be an animated series reboot featuring the original male characters since the concept of a fem four failed to take off.
The Leslie Jones website hack was a follow up to harassment attacks on her on Twitter. The attacks are mostly racial prompting her to leave Twitter and for the social media site to take action against her attackers which included conservative Breitbart commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, considered suspect in the orchestration of the online attacks.
“I did nothing wrong. Twitter has suspended me without evidence of wrongdoing and without explanation while allowing the most appalling abuses to continue on its platform. This is political, plain and simple. Leslie Jones ain’t afraid of no ghost — but evidently, she’s allergic to bad reviews… Twitter is holding me responsible for the actions of fans and trolls using the special pretzel logic of the left. Where are the Twitter police when Justin Bieber’s fans cut themselves on his behalf?”
— Milo Yiannopoulos
Leslie Jones herself made some unsavory racist comments revealed by Breitbart, further fuelling the vitriol against her but she decided to abandon the platform giving her last tweets.
“I feel like I’m in a personal hell. I didn’t do anything to deserve this. It’s just too much. It shouldn’t be like this. So hurt right now.”
“I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart …All this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the [s—] I got today. Wrong.”
— Leslie Jones
Again, it’s increasingly difficult to keep hackers out especially on consumer sites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. What we can best hope for is that our passwords are strong enough to keep them out and that these sites do their security duties properly. We as users need to keep updating our OS against zero-day vulnerabilities, avoid downloading stuff with malware, use a secure firewall and keep our malware and virus detectors updated. And lastly, keep sensitive material out of the cloud. But if hackers can get in and out of the NSA, what chance do celebrities and ordinary people have?