Wired reporter hack reveals perils of ‘the cloud’

08-11-2012 • http://www.rawstory.com, By Agence France-Presse

The perils of modern dependence on Internet-linked gadgets and digitally-stored memories remained a hot topic on Friday in the wake of a hack that wiped clean a Wired reporter’s devices.

Mat Honan laid out at wired.com in gripping detail how his “digital life was destroyed” right down to irreplaceable photos of his baby daughter. Honan next week is to share his quest to repair the damage.

“The take-away from his bad experience is that people need to be careful with using an online service, especially a backup service,” Lookout Mobile Security engineer Tim Strazzere told AFP on Friday.

“The main part is to mitigate risk; he lost a lot of personal information.”

Basic hacker skills were combined with “social engineering,” the art of sweet-talking someone like a customer service rep into bending rules during a phone call, to compromise Honan’s Google, Twitter, and AppleID accounts.