Apple today said that it is investigating reports that hackers made use of vulnerabilities in its iCloud service to breach the accounts of celebrities and steal their private photos and videos, including some nude images.

Earlier, it was reported that the hacks were due to individual accounts on iCloud, an online service to store photos, music and other data from Apple devices.

"We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report," Apple spokeswoman Nat Kerris said in a statement.

A tech wizard posted on online code-sharing site GitHub that he had discovered a bug in Find My iPhone service of Apple. The service is useful as it helps the users track the location of a missing phone and allows a user to disable the phone remotely if it is stolen. The GitHub user claimed that the bug in this service allowed a hacker to keep trying passwords until identifying the right one.

It is to be noted that majority of online services lock down an account after multiple incorrect password attempts to prevent this type of so-called "brute force" attacks.

The GitHub post updated on Monday read: "The end of fun, Apple have just patched."

Rich Mogull, chief executive of security research and advisory firm Securosis, said it is likely that this flaw was exploited by the hackers. "We don't know for sure, but it's very possible that those are related," he said.

He added that there is a possibility that the hackers broke in through the individual accounts of the celebrities versus breaking Apple's system. "I would be shocked Apple itself was hacked," said Mogull.

Several nude photos of actress Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton were posted online by the hacker on Sunday. Another actress, Mary E. Winstead, said on Twitter that the hackers managed to steal photos she took with her husband last year in their home and that she had since deleted. "I can only imagine the creepy effort that went into this," she wrote on her verified Twitter account.