No doubt many of you saw @mat’s tale of getting hacked this past week. Even if you have, the full post at Wired is worth a read, as it contains all the hairy details. Those details include the disturbing failures by Amazon and Apple. Their poor responses after the fact are particularly troubling. They’re going to have to do a lot better than that to shore things up after this attack. Of course, Apple’s track record is very poor, as seen in this shameful 2008 incident.
There are currently a lot of problems with the way account security works, and some of them are not in our control. What you can do is back up your machines and use secure and unique passwords for each site. That actually would not have stopped Mat from getting Honan’ed, but it would have limited the collateral damage.
Stay safe out there.
Update (August 7th, 2012): It appears that Amazon has closed their security hole which led to this attack, and that it’s no longer possible to call in and add information to your Amazon account. As long as Apple believes the last four digits of your credit card are enough to verify you, however, your Apple ID is definitely not safe.
