Apple iCould Hack in China? Personal Photos & Accounts Hacked by Chinese Government

China may either be just testing the security features of Apple's new iPhones or it has just declared war with the American tech giant on privacy.

Those seem to be the most rational ideas as to why the Chinese government has been allegedly orchestrating a massive hacking of the iCloud accounts of its citizens who have Apple devices.

GreatFire.org reported that the Chinese government has staged a "man-in-the-middle" attack on Apple's iCloud with the intention of collecting user data stored on the site.

Apple users in China are reportedly facing a wave of cyber attack. The attacks, however, are not from cyber criminals, but from their own government, confirms CNN Money.

Chinese authorities are said to be intercepting the log-in credentials and information of Chinese iCloud users when they attempt to access the site through certain browsers, discloses GreatFire.org.

"The hacks are so blatant that it appear China does not even care who catches it spying," reports Motherboard.

The site added that Beijing may not be looking at its latest form of online censorship as a digitally-repressive maneuver, but it sure looks as if "it's sticking its middle finger up at Apple."

"This is clearly a malicious attack on Apple in an effort to gain access to usernames and passwords and consequently all data stored on iCloud such as iMessages, photos, contacts, among others," GreatFire.org said.

What prompted the notion that the Chinese government may be declaring a war with Apple is the fact that the alleged cyber attacks coincided with the launching of the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in China last week, CNN Money reported.

GreatFire.org also revealed that the Chinese government has also staged similar cyber attacks on Google and Yahoo users not too long ago.

"While the attacks on Google and Yahoo enabled the authorities to snoop on what information the Chinese were accessing on those two sites, the Apple attack is different. If users ignore the security warning and clicked through to the Apple site and entered their username and password, this information has already been intercepted by Chinese authorities," details the site of the non-profit organization.

Motherboard also thinks that the Chinese government has used its influence over Chinese ISPs, belonging to China Telecom and China Unicom, to intercept the iCloud transactions of its citizens using a fake certificate claiming to come from Apple.

"The Chinese authorities would then interact with the real server and provide the expected content to the user. In theory, the man-in-the-middle principle allows the cyber attackers to masquerade as Apple and collect the iCloud data of its victims," points out Motherboard.