Snippet: Mat Honan was Hacked. Hard. ☇

A terrible story about Mat Honan of Gizmodo and Wired fame and how his Twitter, Google, and iCloud accounts and the Gizmodo Twitter account were hacked, also leading to a remote wipe of his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. It’s unfortunate and really shows the headache one faces when someone’s digital house gets burnt down. If there’s anything to take away from this is that you ought to back up everything to a local, offline place every once in awhile.

Update: Mat explained what happened and how it happened for Wired:

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.