You may even be at risk of identify theft if you store scans of your passport or driving licence on your phone. If banking apps also let you in via the same passcode, or if your password is stored within Apple Keychain, then criminals will be free to make transfers.

By default, no extra security is present, and you don’t have to know the original account password (it’s intended to be easy for those who have forgotten theirs, and if you have both the phone and passcode, Apple assumes you are the rightful owner).

Still, once someone has both the passcode and the phone, it’s easy to lock out the original owner, and even force log out other connected devices such as Macs and iPads. At the time of writing, we are waiting on similar confirmation from the Met. However, it acknowledged that criminals sometimes befriend people on nights out to win their confidence, highlighting an investigation that led to thieves lifting £157,000 worth of items. “Unfortunately, if this happens on a night out or when the victim is unaware of the theft, the criminals get a huge head start.”Ĭity of London Police told us it had no examples of crimes specifically linked to passcodes. “Once a criminal has the passcode to a phone, it is a race against time before they empty the victim’s digital life,” Jake Moore, ESET’s Global Cybersecurity Advisor, tells The Standard. If a criminal notes the number, they can make a note of it, grab your phone and log in as you - which is exactly what happened to Aras.Īlternatively, there are reports of some criminals befriending people on nights out and engineering a way to get the victim to type in their passcode (restarting the phone, for example, requires you to type it in.) As criminals often work in groups, you may even be covertly filmed as you type in the code. The logo in the window of the Apple Store in Regent Street, London / PA ArchiveĪs iPhone users will know, even with Face ID and Touch ID enabled, you are sometimes required to type in the passcode as additional security if you haven’t logged in for a while.

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I forgot my password on my imac