Passwords blamed after stars’ explicit photos leaked

The online hack that led to the posting of hundreds of explicit photos of some of Hollywood’s most famous female stars could have been down to an attack on their passwords.

Stars including actress Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton saw intimate photos posted on forum site 4chan, with some reports initially concluding that Apple’s iCloud service had been compromised to access the images.

A piece of computer code that repeatedly guesses passwords has been found online. The script was posted to software site GitHub, but a message has since appeared saying that Apple has issued a “patch” or fix for the bug.