Red Letter Day for Onanists and Internet Fraudsters

Yesterday a number of explicit photographs of celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, were leaked on the Internet. I'll get to that in a moment. First, if you read no further, read this:

Don't go looking for these photographs, and don't click any links sent to you purporting to be them.

If you must look, we've hosted them all here. Seriously, we have been out a-searching since the news broke, in order to protect our users from the inevitable tide of malware links that have already begun to spring up. The major search engines work hard to keep malicious sites seeded with "current event" keywords from popping up, but this time will be harder, as the sites offering these images will often be similar to those offering the malware.

Now I am going to break from the norm. Most security blogs include the advice "don't take nude photos". I'm not going to ask you to quit. If that's your bag, keep at it — but bear in mind that your photo collection is now worth more. It's now worth more to an attacker who wants to populate their porn site, or to  blackmail you. It is also worth more to you, for the peace of mind of those images being kept private.

If we said the answer was "don't do it" every time doing something on the Internet resulted in a problem, we wouldn't have Internet banking. Or the Internet, come to think of it. So no, you absolutely should store your personal photos on the Internet. You just need to take further steps to ensure they are secure.

These steps include:

1. Make sure you know where your photos are. Many phones now automatically send your images to the NSA/GCHQ etc. under the guise of backup. This can be turned off. Weigh up your dismay at not having your photos any more, vs. the chance of them being stolen. Personally, I vote for backup, as anyone who pinches my pictures will find a heady combination of safari shots, and pictures of serial numbers for things I need to fix. Remember any other backup services (DropBox, Mozy, Backblaze, Crashplan et al) that you use here as well.

2. Secure the photos on-device. If your PC has no password, and your phone regularly sits around unlocked, there's no point hacking your backups. Seems obvious, but the proportion of people who take nude selfies is greater than those who use a lock screen. Apparently.

3. Use a password you use nowhere else. No, really. I mean it this time. I know you ignored me when I said "use a different password everywhere". Look, I forgive you, because I like you. But this one is pretty serious. Don't share the password with the one you use on a messageboard, or for grocery shopping.

4. Turn on "two step verification", "two factor authentication" or whatever anyone's calling it these days.

5. Secure the reset channel. Password resets are a good way to break an account. This could be email (password and 2 factor advice applies here), phone (PIN protect your voicemail!), or silly security questions that anyone with access to your Facebook can answer (make like Graham Cluley and tell them your first pet was called "9£!ttty7-").

A final word on this: watch for those malware links. They're already out there.