A fresh round of nude celebrity photos appears to have surfaced on the internet over the weekend, including yet more stills of actress Jennifer Lawrence as well as reality TV star Kim Kardashian and singer Rihanna.
The photos were initially uploaded to 4chan and Reddit but were swiftly removed thanks to both sites’ revised policy on pics seemingly obtained by illegal means, according to TMZ.
However, they’re still plastered all over the internet, including Twitter.
There has yet to be any confirmation from the handful of new celebs said to have been exposed in the pics, although actress Gabrielle Union has apparently vowed to contact the FBI over leaked pictures of herself, branding the hackers as “vultures” in a strongly worded statement.
The latest release of nude photos is likely to come from the same source(s) as those leaked online earlier this month.
It is thought that they were stolen from iCloud and other online smartphone back-up accounts, although exactly how hasn’t been confirmed yet,
However, Apple claimed that they had come as a result of brute force password attacks against individual accounts rather than any intrinsic flaw in its platform.
"After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the internet," it said in a statement at the time.
"None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple's systems including iCloud or Find My iPhone."
Interestingly, Kardashian’s photos appear to feature a silver BlackBerry device which may indicate that they were taken some years ago and have been stolen from a separate, less secure system.
Security expert Graham Cluley warned users to turn off any cloud back-up function if they want to minimize the risk of exposure.
“However old the private pictures, the humiliation for those – celebrities or otherwise – by photo-stealing hackers remains real, and underlines for all of us that we need to take proper care of our online accounts and be extremely cautious over what we share online,” he wrote in a blog post.
“So, if you haven’t already done so, choose a hard-to-crack, hard-to-guess password that you aren’t using anywhere else online, and enable two-factor authentication where available.”