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I tried to login to my gmail, hotmail, and facebook accounts today. I could not login to those three because they said that my password is incorrect. So I tried to think what I did yesterday. I only used those three websites on my iPad.

One thing I noticed with iPad's safari is that it does not warn me for suspicious websites like Chrome or Firefox do.

I concluded that either someone hacked my facebook account and found primary email accounts from facebook and hacked my emails (since they all use same passwords) or my iPad has been hacked. Is it possible that my iPad was hacked?

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What kind of network did you use to access the sites the day before? Cellular, open or closed Wifi, your wifi? It's possible a password was compromised in the network. – Neth Jan 4 '11 at 15:26
1  
I agree with @Neth, a network compromise is much more likely. Make sure that, going forward, you set your Gmail and Facebook preferences (and Hotmail, if they allow it) to insist on secure logins -- this will prevent your login credentials from being passed in the clear over the network, the way they normally would be. Sniffing out people's info on an open wifi network is as easy and installing a browser plugin, so never, ever trust an open network. – Matthew Frederick Aug 21 '11 at 16:50

2 Answers

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Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions, there are other possible attack vectors. iOS Safari is one of the most secure browsers because of the sandbox design of iOS.

First and foremost, do you use the same password for all three? Password reuse is a dangerous problem, because if one account is compromised an attacker can try that same password on other websites to see if you have the same password there.

Secondly, how complex is your password? If it's a word (or combination of words) from the dictionary, attackers can run automated login attempts to guess short passwords. If your password is short and only contains words then it's much easily guessed using this method.

Thirdly, there's no guarantee that the passwords were compromised in the last 24 hours, it could have happened in the past week.

In any case, change those passwords soon and promptly, make sure they all have different passwords, and try to use numbers, symbols, or uppercase letters to prevent a dictionary attack. Also don't use common tricks like "password1" or "abc123" or "blink182" because attackers keep common passwords like that on file for dictionary attacks.

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To date, there has never been a spyware issue on any iPad. Apple's OSes are generally highly secure; even the desktop OS has few such issues.

So, rest assured your iPad is highly secure, much more so than any Android tablet.

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