Hacking iCloud help

[Frequency]

Long shot but can anyone or anyone's child hack an iCloud and change the password?

DD has lost her phone with all of her logins saved on it. She has 2 step verification setup on everything. We cannot reset any of her passwords as they either want to send an email to her iCloud or text her phone. She cannot even get into her giffgaff account to order a new sim card.

We are willing to pay.

So she has never used another device, e.g. a windows browser to log in to https://www.icloud.com/? Doesn't she know her icloud password? If she has logged in via another device or browser it may have been saved (in the browser). I think there is zero chance of anyone "hacking" an icloud account. There have been cases of celebrity icloud accounts being hacked but that's another story.

If you go to icloud and click the Forgot password link it takes you to https://iforgot.apple.com/password/verify/appleid
where you can supply an phone number or email address linked to the account to start recovering the password - it would be pointless having an icloud email address for this - I would say that she will have had to supply an email address when she first set up her icloud account so go searching back through her other email addresses to see if there is an email from icloud when she first signed up.

Where are her passwords backed up to? I use Bitwarden across all my devices.

Surely she can go to the giffgaff site and follow the "forgot password" link there to get what she wants? All she will need is the email address she signed up with.

Doesn;t she know any of her email address passwords? Once again - there will be a "forgot password" route to follow - unless she has failed to set up a backup email or phone number linked to her email address.

FWIW I wrote software for 25+ years. I have various apple devices.

If all fails you will have to try contacting Apple.

Thanks.

I sorted it for her in the end. She had signed into my Mac but still had 2 step verification on so could not get back into because it was wanting to text her phone.

When I was trying to help her I asked her, "You have tried signing into your GiffGaff account on your Google chrome account on my PC, haven't you?" to which she gave me a blank stare.

She now has a new sim card with her old number and can get the text messages and is back into her iCloud on my Mac.

Literally all of her passwords were saved to her iCloud with no other back up and 2 step verification from her phone number/email all with the same email and no back-up email. I'm going through all her accounts with her now and adding her Googlemail as a backup email and saving all her passwords to google password manager.

Glad you got it sorted - hopeful it is the kind of electronic near death experience needed to think a bit harder about backups and password security - I despair at my own daughter's who still use the same passwords for different accounts - there's no telling them.

Hopefully it is a lesson in a few things. Her phone is/was in someone's car. We can see that from her location history on FindMy family from DD2's iPhone. She got a lift home from the pub. She got out of the car, her phone did not, it stayed in the car and went back to an area where are there several blocks of flats and a couple of taxi offices.

She was that pissed she cannot remember how she got home. She doesn't remember being in a car. We've tried her mates who drive and every local taxi firm we know but it could have been an acquiantance or one of her dad's friends who dropped her off.

I've asked the pub if they can check the CCTV to see if they can find the car who picked her up as that might give us a clue.