Antique

Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Ariana Grande are among the high-profile celebrities who apparently fell victim to a massive alleged iCloud hack late Sunday night, when someone exposed collections of nude photos that they had purportedly saved on their Apple devices.

What iPhone owners might not realize is that they may have already told Apple to back up all of your photos on its iCloud servers. It's easy enough to enable the "My Photo Stream" feature — then forget that it's running in the background, uploading every picture you take.

If hackers gain access to your iCloud account, they could easily download all your photos without ever laying hands on your iPhone or iPad. And as we've seen time and time again, hackers can and do obtain passwords and break into such accounts.

Apple hasn't commented on the leaked photos yet, so there's no way of knowing for sure whether the company's iCloud service was to blame. But ZDNet is reporting that Apple has already patched a security exploit that could have allowed hackers to obtain iCloud passwords for the targeted accounts.

While we wait for clarification, it's worth taking a few key steps to protect your iOS photos — especially if they're ones you don't want getting out.

Is Photo Stream uploading all your photos to iCloud?

In your Photos app, you're probably familiar with the Camera Roll, which are the photos you've taken that are physically stored on your device. But if you've enabled Photo Stream, you'll also see a My Photo Stream album.

How to disable Photo Stream

If you're worried about security and would rather disable Photo Stream now, open the Settings app on your device, then tap "iCloud." Tap "Photos" (or "Photo Stream" in iOS 6), then manually switch off the Photo Stream feature. (If anything important is backed up in Photo Stream, make sure you've backed it up elsewhere first.)



You'll also want to switch Photo Stream off on all devices you want protected.