Cloud Bites Man

http://www.emptyage.com/post/28679875595/yes-i-was-hacked-hard

Man's iCloud account (he's some sort of journalist) was compromised, then his laptop, tablet, and phone wiped. Then they took over his Facebook and Twitter. Customer support... helpless of course. They can't send a PIN to his phone, or verify his (now changed) account information, etc.

Welcome to your digital future.

At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere. When I set it up, years and years ago, that seemed pretty secure at the time. But it’s not. Especially given that I’ve been using it for, well, years and years. My guess is they used brute force to get the password [see update -ed.] and then reset it to do the damage to my devices.

The backup email address on my Gmail account is that same .mac email address. At 4:52 PM, they sent a Gmail password recovery email to the .mac account. Two minutes later, an email arrived notifying me that my Google Account password had changed.

At 5:00 PM, they remote wiped my iPhone

At 5:01 PM, they remote wiped my iPad

At 5:05, they remote wiped my MacBook Air.

A few minutes after that, they took over my Twitter. Because, a long time ago, I had linked my Twitter to Gizmodo’s they were then able to gain entry to that as well.

...

Having a 32 gig flash-drive is much safer than having any sorta of cloud account IMO. Many times these brute force password breakers are why so much porn is free, it comes free embedded while you stream.

Technical support tends to go alot further when you make a call, It will all be back Monday if he plays his cards right.

Yeah. Real Men back up their own shit. The fella made a few mistakes -- pointing his two primary emails to each other as backups, obviously. But its hard to fault him -- a lot of people would be fucked over that way, if someone got their goat. That he did a pretty good job and failed says quite a bit about what it's like 'out there' these days.

I'm still not convinced it would not be in our national interest to simply cut all the Pacific cables to Asia (what good comes from all that shit they send us?). One Viking long ship with a nice iron anchor could do the job.

How email hacking works? – how to hack email account password?

Here is a 2 year old article, sorta explains the situation.

I've never completely trusted backing up to iCloud, so I don't do it. You can do it yourself quick and easy using the iTunes app. Once a week, I first backup my iPhone, then sync it (with the iTunes acct). Always back up before you take any updates, especially if it's for a new iOS. I once had one go wrong midstream, and my phone got wiped to a factory state as a result. 25 minutes later using the backup, I was back in business.

It also probably makes sense to have an email account that you use for nothing but iTunes, where no one else has the email address, at least that's what I do.