iTunes backup password...
Apr. 8th, 2013 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI only just noticed, a few days ago, that the local backup made of the data on my iPhone is encrypted, and today, it occurred to me that I had no idea what my backup password was (or that, indeed, I had ever been asked to set one). So I tried changing the password (which requires the old one and isn't as disruptive as attempting a restore that I don't need), and after trying every conceivable plausible password, came up against a brick wall.
There really aren't too many online resources to solve this problem that are helpful. One quite prevalent "solution" suggested downloading a program that can apparently be configured to brute-force your password (and whose cost is not trivial). From what I gather, you can download and run the program without paying anything, but once it finds your password, it will displays only the first couple of letters and invite you to cough up some cabbage and buy the application (which is probably heaps better than asking for the mazuma up front).
I hit the Apple Support Communities and was truly amazed at the number of queries on this issue, and also by the number of people—I have no idea who they are—who insist that it was impossible to have had a password set for you without knowing it. (To such individuals, I proffer a number of web sites that, at one point or another, asked me to provide answers to security questions that I had never created.) The general tone of the crowd is that this password issue is a bug, and that one's password might be any password that has been used on one's iPhone while using it.
What makes it a pernicious bug is that unless you know the password, you can't change it, or even disable encrypted backups (even at the cost of losing any saved backups). This might make sense from a security perspective, but considering how much rides on one's Apple ID when dealing with iCloud (and resetting an Apple ID password is a piece of cake, if you have forgotten the current password), the inability to at least disable the backup password does seem like a bit of overkill. If I understand the gist of the solutions I've read so far, they involve basically wiping one's iPhone clean, restoring it to factory settings, and then linking it to iTunes again.
Humbug to that!
In any event, my own call for help has been up on the Support Communities for almost 12 hours, averaging about a view per hour. No joy as yet.
Cheers...
There really aren't too many online resources to solve this problem that are helpful. One quite prevalent "solution" suggested downloading a program that can apparently be configured to brute-force your password (and whose cost is not trivial). From what I gather, you can download and run the program without paying anything, but once it finds your password, it will displays only the first couple of letters and invite you to cough up some cabbage and buy the application (which is probably heaps better than asking for the mazuma up front).
I hit the Apple Support Communities and was truly amazed at the number of queries on this issue, and also by the number of people—I have no idea who they are—who insist that it was impossible to have had a password set for you without knowing it. (To such individuals, I proffer a number of web sites that, at one point or another, asked me to provide answers to security questions that I had never created.) The general tone of the crowd is that this password issue is a bug, and that one's password might be any password that has been used on one's iPhone while using it.
What makes it a pernicious bug is that unless you know the password, you can't change it, or even disable encrypted backups (even at the cost of losing any saved backups). This might make sense from a security perspective, but considering how much rides on one's Apple ID when dealing with iCloud (and resetting an Apple ID password is a piece of cake, if you have forgotten the current password), the inability to at least disable the backup password does seem like a bit of overkill. If I understand the gist of the solutions I've read so far, they involve basically wiping one's iPhone clean, restoring it to factory settings, and then linking it to iTunes again.
Humbug to that!
In any event, my own call for help has been up on the Support Communities for almost 12 hours, averaging about a view per hour. No joy as yet.
Cheers...
