iOS. First Steps to Protect Your iPhone and iPad.

For many, the iPhone and iPad have become an integral part of their image and indispensable work tools. In this course, we will try to make your gadget secure as well. This chapter is introductory; it will discuss the first steps to configure the protection of devices running the iOS operating system. These are simple and basic steps, perhaps a bit banal and obvious, but I cannot skip them.

Disable iCloud

You may have noticed that when you purchase a new Apple device and enter your Apple ID information, your contacts, documents, and saved passwords are immediately uploaded to the device. I won't argue – it's very convenient. But imagine if your account data falls into the hands of an attacker? They would easily gain access to all your information; I wrote about this in the course.

All stored information is placed on Apple servers, which Edward Snowden advised against. And there was a reason for that – the collaboration between Apple and the NSA. If previously this was just a baseless belief, after the arrest of the "spam king" Petr Levashov in Barcelona and his extradition to the USA, the threat of surveillance through iCloud was confirmed. It was thanks to iCloud that US intelligence agencies, in collaboration with Apple, tracked down and deanonymized the well-known hacker.

Do you really need this option at the cost of sacrificing the security of your data? The first step you can take for the security of your iPhone or iPad is to go to settings, select "iCloud," and disable synchronization (Settings > Passwords & Accounts > iCloud).