The utterly horrifying reality of today's consumer cloud services

I’ve got 6 Apple computers live at the moment along with 2 iPads and 3 iPhones.

I’d be seriously annoyed if they were lost or stolen.

But I’d be safe in the knowledge that the important stuff is stored on iCloud, DropBox, Box, Evernote, Google and Amazon.

I’d also be quietly confident of being able to nuke them via iCloud to protect any errant data stored on the devices (I try and keep everything in the cloud).

However I am not well prepared for someone logging into iCloud and nuking everything without my control.

That’s what happened to Mat Honan at Wired.

It’s worse, though: A hacker was able to nuke his devices (and ALL his backups/data) and then take control of a whole host of other services related to (or powered via) his Apple ID. (The hacker even deleted is Google account!)

He’s written up the whole experience. It is horrifying reading but I strongly recommend reading through the whole post to get the full picture.

The short story? Mat was completely failed by ‘social engineering’ — someone phoned up Apple and got access to his account that way.

😐