The thief claims to have about 60 photographs of Lawrence, as well as naked images from more than 100 other celebrities, including Sports Illustrated model Kate Upton and Australian actresses Teresa Palmer (Warm Bodies) and Yvonne Strahovski (24, Dexter). Target: Jennifer Lawrence. Credit:Getty Images Though unconfirmed (Apple is not commenting), it is possible that hackers have used passwords stolen in one of several mega data breaches in the past year to gain access to high-profile accounts. In fact, a hacker taking aim at a specific target to grab photos taken by their iPhone is a scenario that Ty Miller, director of online risk management firm Threat Intelligence, says is "absolutely plausible". So how can this happen, and how do you make sure photos taken with your devices stay out of malicious hands?

Don't reuse passwords If you’d prefer to not have your iDevice automatically send every photo you take to the cloud, this is the setting you need to turn off. Cyber safety authorities are starting to sound like a broken record on this, but one of the simplest and surest way to keep sensitive information online is to protect it with a strong, unique password. "All an attacker needs to compromise an iCloud account is their email address, which is often publicly known, and their iCloud password," Miller said. "Unfortunately, many users reuse their passwords across a number of online social networking sites and forums. This increases the risk of their account becoming breached since their password is only as secure as the weakest online application."

This effectively means that if Lawrence signed up to a mailing list or news website that required a password, and she uses the same password on her iPhone, a breach of security at the former can give hackers access to all photos taken with her phone as well. "With the number of security breaches occurring across the internet that have leaked the usernames and passwords of hundreds of millions of users worldwide, it is likely that the hackers are simply logging in to the victim accounts using previously compromised passwords," Miller said. "This may be through publicly known security breaches or a new breach of a company that stores details of a large number of celebrities." The best practice is to use a different password for every service and change them regularly. Unless you're blessed with eidetic memory, this may require you to invest in password database software. Disable iCloud

Do you really need your phone or iPad sending copies of all your images to the cloud? It's convenient to have an automatic back-up, but the reality of sending private content into the ether should be given some serious thought. "When storing private data on to cloud systems, users should assume that at some stage the cloud provider will become compromised in one way or another," Miller said. "They should then consider what impact that would have on them if their private data was stolen." If you decide you can live without the cloud, it's easy to stop iCloud from sending your photos online. On your device, go to settings, and then iCloud. You'll see a list of apps that are sending data to be stored in the cloud, but the relevant one here is "photos".

Disabling photos here will stop a feature called "Photo Stream", which keeps a back-up of all your photos online, even if you delete them from your device. It's worth noting that, even if you do this, should your iCloud account be compromised, photos can still be taken from your phone back-ups. These happen periodically and contain only the photos that were on your device at the time it was backed up. You can disable cloud back-ups in settings>iCloud>storage & backup. Don't take nude photos with your phone