Feeling safe and secure about your online life, are you? That may change after you read the harrowing tale of a Wired reporter whose entire digital life was erased over the weekend -- and how you can avoid the same fate.
Wired reporter Mat Honan was hacked over the weekend, and like any good tech journalist, has written up his adventure into a cautionary tale for all to read. Security flaws in both Amazon and Apple customer service systems caused Honan's digital life to erode before his very eyes.
"First my Google account was taken over, then deleted," Honan writes. "Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook."
So how did it all go down? It seems that Amazon tech support actually gave the hacker the ability to see four digits of Honan's credit card number, which was enough to use Apple tech support to access the journalist's iCloud account -- as well as at least a few other, less public users.
The problem stems from Honan using the same credit card on both Amazon and Apple. Accessing the iCloud account through Apple Support required only the user's billing address and the last four digits of his credit card, which was easily obtained from Amazon. That's enough to give anyone a temporary iCloud password, and from there it was all downhill.
"Apple takes customer privacy seriously and requires multiple forms of verification before resetting an Apple ID password," explains Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris. "In this particular case, the customer’s data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer. In addition, we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely. We are reviewing all of our processes for resetting account passwords to ensure our customers’ data is protected."
MacLife.com encourages readers to follow the entire saga on Wired and it's certainly worth it to plug any potential holes in your own security, even though Apple is likely to step up their own efforts in the wake of this very public gaffe.
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(Image courtesy of Wired)
