Once in, the hacker spammed Honan's Twitter followers and deleted all the data from his various devices.
By now, you may have heard the story of the identity 'hack' perpetrated against Wired journalist Mat Honan.
ENGADGET: Amazon, Apple stop taking key account changes over the phone after identity breach
Mat Honan writes a great piece about the one function that Twitter needs.
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If so, you may be sympathetic to an article tech journalist Mat Honan wrote this week for Gizmodo.
This is what happened to Mat Honan, former journalist for Gizmodo and former contributing editor to WIRED magazine.
Honan believes that this was done by a process called brute forcing, that is, trying passwords until you get lucky.
"I honestly didn't have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before, " he wrote Honan.
While Honan hints that he may have put at least some of the pieces back together, not everyone gets that second chance.
ENGADGET: Amazon, Apple stop taking key account changes over the phone after identity breach
But the larger danger of password insecurity and increased cyber-malice is the swift domino effect that can lead to identity theft of the Mat Honan variety.
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It started with a call to the Apple Help Desk, and Phobia was able to give just enough data to convince the agent that he was Honan.
As Mat Honan pointed out on Gizmodo, the problem with social search and personal results is that it biases the results based on the perspective of your friends.
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They found Honan's home address and e-mail address online, and after some back and forth with Amazon tech support, used it to get the last four digits of Honan's credit card number.
They called Apple customer support pretending to be Honan and used those four numbers along with same billing address to verify his identity, gaining access to Honan's iCloud account and the associated .
However, while investigating the breach over the weekend, Honan said he confirmed twice with Apple tech support that only two pieces of information are required to get access to an iCloud account: a billing address and the last four digits of the credit card associated with the account.
Both Amazon and Apple were docked for how easy it was to modify an account over the phone -- and, in close succession, have both put at least a momentary lockdown on the changes that led to Honan losing much of his digital presence and some irreplaceable photos.
ENGADGET: Amazon, Apple stop taking key account changes over the phone after identity breach
From the " epic hack" of Wired's Mat Honan to the breach of Dropbox and the breakdown of barriers at Blizzard ( not to mention countless smaller incidents), last year held frequent reminders that what you put online is never truly safe.
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