Jennifer Lawrence, Mary Elizabeth Winstead hacked: How safe are your cloud photos and data?

News emerged over the weekend that dozens of celebrities' online accounts were hacked, and many had nude photos leaked to the public.

The pictures of stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Mary Elizabeth Winstead were allegedly taken from a cloud-based Internet data storage system.

If a celebrity's phone is vulnerable to a hacker, you may wonder if your phone is at risk.

Dan Ackerman, a senior editor at CBS News partner CNET, said it is, though celebrities are more vulnerable because hackers are actively looking for their data.

"If you think about it, you have multiple copies (of your data). There's a chance anything you put up in the cloud, it's available in some way," Ackerman said. "If (hackers are) not looking for it, less so really."

Many have wondered how the hacker or hackers even knew these celebrities took nude photos of themselves, and then knew which system to get into.

"I feel like it may not be one person, it may be a group of people and they may have been photos taken over months or years and may have been taken with different devices, not just Apple devices," Ackerman said.

The CNET editor also speculated that the hackers were interested in "making a big splash" by going and boasting online about "all the cool stuff I got."

Sadly, the steps ordinary people can take to protect their data are not foolproof.

"We use so many cloud services, which is great for backing up information and accessing it, but it adds to the degree of vulnerability because it's out there," Ackerman said.

The best thing you can do easily is to put on two-factor authentication on your accounts like Gmail and Apple does, he said.

"If you want to change something, you get a text message, you have to respond to a code, so that makes sure you physically have your phone with you to make a big change to your account," Ackerman said.

Unfortunately, no one company is better at protecting your data than another, he said. A scam emerged earlier this year where people found their phones hijacked, displaying messages that made them think the phones were locked or lost and could only be recovered with a payment.

Gmail also had a lot of instances in places like China where the government tried to hack into people's accounts.

Ackerman said he and his colleagues like to remind people that you can delete your data, "but there's a good chance somebody has a copy of it."

"I would say to be on the safe side: assume a backup copy or mirrored copy may have been gotten before you deleted it," he added.