There has been, apparently, a theft of nude pictures of celebrities and pictures claimed to be of celebrities (some celebrities have denied the shots are of them, some have said that the shots are of them). Hundreds of such photos have been posted in various places online and the hunt is on for the perpetrators. Well, in some cases. In others, the hunt is on for the pictures themselves. In either case, though, the stealing of the pictures was made possible because the pictures were all stored on iCloud.
Apple may or may not be good at security and software development (my personal opinion is that they are absolute garbage at both) but the point here is not that Apple is to blame. They may or may not be; I am sure the investigation will help determine how exactly this happened. What is more interesting to me is what the fact that famous people had nude shots of themselves -- the paparazzi jackpot -- stored in a consumer level cloud environment like iCloud. It has to be remembered that "the cloud" is just a marketing term for a collection of servers not under your direct control. Celebrities put items that many people would obviously kill to get their hands on, items that could be personally and/or professionally damaging, on servers that were for general public use instead of more secure options. And I bet that they didn't even think twice about it, of they thought about it at all.
Most of these services, whether provided by Google or Apple or Microsoft or smaller companies try to do everything they can to make people use them by default. It is incredibly easy, during the setup of a new device, to ACCEPT button your way to sending everything to cloud storage by default. I would wager that the majority of people whose pictures were stolen weren't even aware that those pictures were in iCloud. And even if they did, they were probably lulled a bit by the notion that the storage was "theirs", and therefor safe. That wasn't true in any meaningful sense of the word. Obviously, the material wasn't safe, but the storage wasn't really "theirs", either: it was just a slice, a small part, of a larger server. Their data was stored with hundreds to millions of others. Breaking the protection on the server, or collection of servers, opened the door to any items on those servers. The cloud doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the providers.
And the providers probably aren't going to get much better at protecting it. Security costs money and absent market pressures or government regulation, money spent on security it money not turned into profits. Unless people abandon cloud services after these kinds of events -- something that has yet to happen -- there are no market pressures to improve. Which in turn means that such services will be targeted more and more, and not just for salacious photos.
People use cloud services because they are so convenient. Having everything available on any device is a truly remarkable benefit. And people take advantage of that benefit, storing photos, contacts, tax returns, personal documents, etc on cloud services of one kind or another. There is a lot of money to be made in stealing everything digital, from photos to whole identities. No one should be surprised when thieves hit target rich environments like iCloud. And unless we collectively decide to do something about it, whether through shunning the cloud or through regulations to tighten security, you can expect to see more and more digital Willie Suttons thumbing through the stuff they find on "your" cloud.