Let's start with the fact that Apple is forcing people to use an E-mail address as a user ID. That's just straight-up stupid.
How many members of the public think that they have to use their E-mail account password as their password for Apple ID and every other amateur-hour site that enforces this dumb rule?
MILLIONS. I would bet a decent amount of money on it. So if any one of these sites is hacked and the user database is compromised, all of the user's Web log-ins that have this policy are wide open.
Then there's the simple fact that everyone's E-mail address is on thousands of spammers' lists. A simple brute-force attack using the top 100 passwords is also going to yield quite a trove, I'd imagine.
Apple IDs didn't originally have to be E-mail addresses. They're going backward.
The thing that made this bug possible was because, while your Apple ID has to be an email address, Apple has a mechanism to avoid exposing it to third parties - unlike Google, Apple, or Facebook's single sign-on implementation; the bug seems to be in the step between verifying your identity and telling Apple whether you would or would not like your email address to be exposed.
If anything, the issue is that third parties treat the email address as a unique, unchangeable identity, and then agree to rely on Apple's assertion of what your email address is. But given how hard identity is - and the challenges in dealing with passwords, account recovery, and name changes at scale - it's a pretty reasonable tradeoff to make.
How many members of the public think that they have to use their E-mail account password as their password for Apple ID and every other amateur-hour site that enforces this dumb rule?
MILLIONS. I would bet a decent amount of money on it. So if any one of these sites is hacked and the user database is compromised, all of the user's Web log-ins that have this policy are wide open.
Then there's the simple fact that everyone's E-mail address is on thousands of spammers' lists. A simple brute-force attack using the top 100 passwords is also going to yield quite a trove, I'd imagine.
Apple IDs didn't originally have to be E-mail addresses. They're going backward.