Nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and several other celebrities were leaded online this weekend by an unknown hacker who apparently was able to login to the stars' iCloud storage accounts and steal some very intimate photos. While the hacker has claimed that accessing iCloud is how the photos were obtained, Apple has yet to confirm any sort of security flaw in its cloud service. 

Apparently, the hacker uploaded the photos to the website 4chan and was attempting to sell additional photos for Bitcoin currency. The hacker reportedly then claimed to merely be in possession of the photos and not the person who initially obtained them. 

iCloud is Apple's online cloud storage utility that can wirelessly backup iOS device users' data. It is an optional backup utility, but if used, it is able to store photos, emails, contacts and more. Once stored on iCloud's servers, users can then access backed up data from any device with an internet connection. 

Are the photos genuine? Many of them are. Several of the stars--including Jennifer Lawrence, Mary-Elizabeth Winstead and Kate Upton--have confirmed that the photos of them leaked this weekend are indeed real. Lawrence and Upton's representation have threatened legal action against anyone copying or disseminating the photos, while Winstead angrily decried the leak on her twitter account. 

Not all of the photos turned out to be real, however. Notably, photos of Victoria Justice were proven to be fake. "These so called nudes of me are FAKE people. Let me nip this in the bud right now. *pun intended,*" Justice tweeted yesterday.

iCloud is accessed by users logging into the iCloud website with a username and password. The likelihood that the hacker somehow figured out the actual login credentials of all these stars is remote. What's more likely is that they discovered some previously unknown vulnerability in iCloud and then exploited it. 

The data stored in iCloud is encrypted, so if a hacker somehow hacked into iCloud itself, they would've needed a way to decrypt the photos to make them visibly. This is unlikely. Apple uses a secure authentication system within each of its core apps that make manually entering a password each time you need to access your data unnecessary. This way of doing away with the need for passwords within apps is supposed to be very secure. Clearly it wasn't as secure as people thought.