Every couple of days, when I do an action that requires authentication with an Apple ID, I get the message that my Apple ID has been locked for security reasons. I unlock it, and then a few days later it is locked again.
So the obvious conclusion would be that Apple is locking it because someone keeps trying to hack into it. Probably hackers attempt to use known passwords on every @me.com, @iCloud.com, or @Mac.com email address.
But, I have two-factor authentication turned on. That means that if I try to sign in from a browser or app that isn’t trusted, I’ll get the notification on all of my devices that I need to approve the sign-in. Since I’m not getting blasted with these, I think it means that the hacker tries a couple of incorrect passwords, never gets one right, reaches a limit for wrong guesses, and the id is locked.
What I’m wondering is, isn’t there a better way for Apple to handle this? Such as, lock the Apple ID for untrusted devices, but not trusted? Or is it that my browser isn’t trusted anymore either, because the browser privacy changes mean the cookie it uses to know it is trusted gets dropped quickly?
Are other people getting plagued by constant security locks?
My friend set up an account for her daughter, and apparently there is a woman in Brazil and another one in Europe who seem to think that her daughter’s email address is theirs. They’ve had travel reservations, work emails, school registrations, etc. sent to her address. Predictably, they often don’t get these emails they’re expecting, so they try to log into the account and fail repeatedly, eventually getting it locked. You’d figure that they’d quickly realize the email address isn’t theirs, but it has gone on for years.
Fortunately, my friend and her daughter rarely need to log into her account, so it’s not that much of a nuisance. But every time they do need to get in, they will invariably ask me for help getting it unlocked.
I’m not really sure what Apple can really do here. It’s not really a good idea to add exceptions to get around the lock as that opens the possibility of inadvertently weakening the account’s security.
A vaguely related issue that I have recently encountered is that I can no longer log into Apple Discussions with my original AppleID. It started off as myname then myname@mac.com, then myname@me.com and finally (I hope) myname@icloud.com. However I could only continue with Discussions if I used the original AppleID. If I try to log in with, say, myname@icloud.com it prompts me for a new online user name.
In a text conversation with Apple Support I was told I needed to phone Apple Support (in Australia) to resolve this issue. I am not sure whether to do this and risk wrecking my AppleID credentials or to forego my previous contributions to Discussions. I am inclining towards the latter!
Not sure if this is related in some way- - probably not but it’s an apple id issue.
A friend of mine - I’ll call him Spud had his appleid as Spud@waitrose.com
Last year Waitrose.com announced it was closing down.
Spud then obtained his own domain and using his imac, he reset his appleid to spud@spud.net.
All good.
Then a month or so back Waitrose.com finally shut down. And that is when the fun started.
He now appears to have 2 appleids, one that works and one that doesn’t.
Whenever he uses his desktop iMac he gets a pop-up to the effect that there is a problem with spud@waitrose and he should check his setting etc. there’s a dismiss box that works but a a few minutes later the message pops up again.
This doesn’t happen on his phone or his 2 ipads - just the desktop.
He’s taken to dragging the pop-up off the screen and leaving it there.
Logging in to Apple to try to remove it completely is futile as it wants him to respond to a link it emails to spud@waitrose.
Any suggestions as to what is triggering the pop-up in the first place? It launches just after the desktop appears on start-up. I’ve not managed to find anything.
In my case the Internet Accounts settings on my Mac apparently became corrupted and clashed with email accounts. Annoyingly I found that the corruption seemed to prevent me from deleting the unwanted account. I had to contact Apple Support to resolve it.
Well, you can have two separate Apple ID’s based on two email addresses, but from what I am hearing (from a sibling today), it can get messy over time.
My hunch is that “Discussions” is really not associated with your AppleID in any meaningful way. It just happens to use that when you first sign up. After that, it is own separate world just if you had signed up using your AppleID at a Google site. Just a different database where the ID you used initially was the same.
I find this kind of behavior all over the place. They present initially as the same, but really are not. Best one right now are small regional airline displays and acting as the parent major airline. Have a bad flight with the regional though and the major airline has never heard of you.