Is my icloud account hacked?

Is my icloud account hacked? I recently created several documents from both a Mac mini and an iMac. I know these files were saved on both machines and on the cloud because I opened them throughout the weekend. Now, a few days later all of them disappeared. And they were not saved in the same folder! In addition to not being in the folders, they were also not to be found in the recent folder, nor did they show up in the search finder. I also went online and signed into my iCloud account and did a file recovery with no luck. It is as if I never created them. However, the folders (now empty) that they were located in had the date that they were last used. Because of this, I disconnected the internet and opened the disk utility on the iMac and found that there is an APFS Volume called Creedence(blah blah blah) _Cryptex. This volume was running and could not be removed even without the internet and every app closed and the external hard drives unplugged.

Mac mini, macOS 14.6

Posted on Feb 19, 2026 1:52 PM

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Posted on Feb 19, 2026 2:33 PM

You are supposed to have the Creedence Cryptex file on your computer as it is part of Mac OS. If you open it, then you will have that volume created on your Mac, so did you double click that file? It should be there whether or not you are connected to the internet or have an external drive connected.


Now for your missing files, are you storing your Desktop & Documents folders in iCloud. Storing files in those folder will also create a local copy for offline use, but that local copy will also be removed when it has been deleted from any subfolder of Desktop or Documents. Any device listed at  > System Settings > [name on top], and scrolling to the bottom is capable of permanently deleting those files. Do you have any other devices listed there?


The Date Modified of the Folder you had the file saved will show you the date and time a file was either added or deleted from that folder, so that should be helpful to determine when that occurred. So that would leave 3 things that could have happened:

  • It was deleted from another device in your Device list.
  • Someone else has physical access to one of your devices and knows the Login/Passcode. Change your Login/Passcode if you don't want that person to access the device.
  • Someone knows your Apple Account password to delete the file from iCloud. In that case change your Apple Account password.

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3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 19, 2026 2:33 PM in response to glenmillsdad

You are supposed to have the Creedence Cryptex file on your computer as it is part of Mac OS. If you open it, then you will have that volume created on your Mac, so did you double click that file? It should be there whether or not you are connected to the internet or have an external drive connected.


Now for your missing files, are you storing your Desktop & Documents folders in iCloud. Storing files in those folder will also create a local copy for offline use, but that local copy will also be removed when it has been deleted from any subfolder of Desktop or Documents. Any device listed at  > System Settings > [name on top], and scrolling to the bottom is capable of permanently deleting those files. Do you have any other devices listed there?


The Date Modified of the Folder you had the file saved will show you the date and time a file was either added or deleted from that folder, so that should be helpful to determine when that occurred. So that would leave 3 things that could have happened:

  • It was deleted from another device in your Device list.
  • Someone else has physical access to one of your devices and knows the Login/Passcode. Change your Login/Passcode if you don't want that person to access the device.
  • Someone knows your Apple Account password to delete the file from iCloud. In that case change your Apple Account password.

Feb 19, 2026 4:45 PM in response to glenmillsdad

I thank you for the response to my question. I think you are correct in saying that someone has my login credentials. What I would like to do is go online to the iCloud website, login to my account and sign off every device from there. If someone has access to my account, this will also log out the unknown user. From there I should be able to change the password and then use the new password to login to all my devices manually. What I don’t know is if there is anything on my devices that can reconnect to the “someone” and re-establish spying on my equipment and / or the account. I was always under the impression that Apple devices can not be hacked or spied upon. It sure does seem like this is what has happened because I recently changed my iCloud password. Oh, and one more thing happened that is unexplainable. I received a phone call from a township detective doing an investigation on someone I dealt with several years age. A couple of days after the phone call I was looking at the recent calls (iPhone) and the detectives call was erased. The calls before and after were still there but not that one.

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Is my icloud account hacked?

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