How to avoid being hacked like Honan

Hackers used an iCloud account to perform a remote wipe on Mat Honan's iPhone, iPad and MacBook, deleting all his data. Photograph: M4OS Photos/Alamy

I read about Mat Honan, the journalist who had his email hacked and his devices wiped. What should we all be doing to avoid this kind of thing?

For those who missed the story, Wired journalist Mat Honan had hisGmail and Twitter accounts hacked, which is not all that unusual. What made the story "epic" was that the hacker(s) used his Apple iCloud account to perform a "remote wipe" on his iPhone, iPad and MacBook, deleting all his data. Worse still, he didn't have backups.

It was evident that something had gone wrong from the tweets the hacker sent from Honan's Twitter account and Gizmodo's account, to which it was linked. (He used to work there.) Honan went public on 3 August 2012 in a blogpost: Yes, I was hacked. Hard. At the time, he blamed his old seven-digit alphanumeric password.

Read More about this story and Two Factor Authentication here

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