iPhone, Mac owners: How to stymie hackers extorting Apple, threatening to wipe devices

Hackers claiming to have hundreds of millions of iCloud credentials have threatened to wipe date from iPhones, iPads and Macs if Apple does not fork over $150,000 within two weeks.

"This group is known for getting accounts and credentials, they have gotten credentials in the past," said Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development at Tripwire, of the purported hackers. "But whether they have that many ... who knows?"

There's another reason for not panicking, Bailey said: People can quickly make their accounts more secure, assuming the criminals have only collected, not actually compromised the iCloud accounts by changing millions of passwords.

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