Apple (AAPL) CEO Cook: We're Stepping Up the iCloud Security Game

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) CEO Tim Cook took matters into his own hands Thursday following recent headlines of security issues surrounding the company's cloud offerings, which led to lewd photos of certain celebrities being leaked onto the Internet.

According to the WSJ, Cook said Apple is beefing up its security with iCloud, but denied that security measures had been lacking in the past. The Journal states: Cook said celebrities' iCloud accounts were compromised when hackers correctly answered security questions to obtain their passwords, or when they were victimized by a phishing scam to obtain user IDs and passwords.

Apple will now alert users vai email and push notifications on pending account password changes, data transfers to a new device, or initial logins to an account by a new device.

New notifications will start to be sent within two weeks, Cook said.

Cook also believes Apple could have done a little bit more to make users aware of potential hacks. When I step back from this terrible scenario that happened and say what more could we have done, I think about the awareness piece ... I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That's not really an engineering thing, the CEO noted.

Apple will also broaden the use of its two-factor authentication, which requires a user, or a hacker, to have two of three things to access an account: a password, a separate four-digit one-time code, or a long access key given to the user when they signed up for the service.

The majority of users don't use a two-factor authentication, Apple recently said.

Shares of Apple are positive in early trading Friday.

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