Wired / Aurich Lawson
The enticing promise of cloud computing is one that plays on our human desire for convenience. Without much fuss, remote servers host your data, including photos, music, health records—in essence, your digital life. Your info gets synced to all your devices, duplicated in case your physical backups fail. It would make George Jetson scream with envy. But what happens when hackers wipe away your digital life in the blink of an eye? This is what happened to Mat Honan, a senior editor at Wired, when a hacker stole and deleted his data. This hack required a few steps in succession that exploited authentication methods used in popular services like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Apple’s iCloud service. Mat wrote about this act of vandalism against him, and he is still dealing with the effects of losing his information.
Mat Honan visits the Ars Technicast in this episode to talk in detail about the fallout after the theft and wiping (yes, they wiped his devices), and what users should do to protect their data. We talk about Google’s two-step verification as a method of protection against hacks. Unfortunately, though, there remain some inherent risks in the cloud services we use today. Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng is joined by Social Editor Cesar Torres and Ars Contributor Casey Johnston in this conversation with Mat.
In Mat’s case, he was able to contact his hacker to find out more about why he was chosen in this attack, but in the end, he will probably permanently lose a couple years of family photos of irreplaceable emotional value.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
DIGITAL JUICE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank's!