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[HOW TO] Protect your iCloud account against hacks

News of the massive celebrity iCloud hack was all over the internet yesterday with Apple even promising this morning to investigate the apparent breach of its iCloud backup and storage cloud service to find out if an infiltration had indeed occurred. While Apple does its investigating, you can already protect yourself from further hacks using something called two-factor authentication on your iCloud account.

Two-factor authentication is exactly what your bank uses when it sends you a one-time-pin via SMS when you’re doing certain things while internet banking. It works on the assumption that every password should be a combination of something that only you should know (your password) as well as something only you should have access to (your cellphone). Apple’s iCloud isn’t the only service that lets you set up two-factor authentication either; we’ve already shown how to set it up for Google services like Gmail, Facebook and your Microsoft account which includes Hotmail.

In the slideshow below, we’ll take you through exactly how to set up two-factor authentication for iCloud, step by step, so that you’ll be safe from malicious attempts to get at your data. Each image goes full screen if you’re struggling to see where to go next, or you can just follow along with the step-by-step text guide below.

Steps

  1. Log in to your iCloud account at www.icloud.com
  2. Open ‘Account Settings’ by clicking on your face in the top right corner and selecting it from the drop-down menu.
  3. Click on your Apple ID email address.
  4. Click ‘Manage Your Apple ID’ and sign in again.
  5. Click ‘Password and Security’.
  6. Click ‘Get started’.
  7. Read the explanation of two-step verification and click ‘Continue’.
  8. Read some more information on the benefits of two-step verification once again click ‘Continue’.
  9. Next you’ll get some important things to remember before clicking ‘Continue’ again.
  10. Enter your phone number and remember to select the correct country code.
  11. Apple will send you an SMS with a four-digit PIN code which you will need to enter here before continuing.
  12. You can choose to verify some of your iDevices to act as authenticators.
  13. Save the backup verification key and keep it somewhere safe either in Dropbox or Google Drive (which both allow for two-factor authentication as well). You’ll need to prove that you still have the code by entering it on the next screen.
  14. Enable two-step verification.
  15. Congratulations, you’re safe from almost all kinds of hacking.
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