On Friday night, Mat Honan, a senior reporter for Gizmodo, got hacked. Hard:
At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. . .
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.
The full account of his travails is terrifying for anyone who lives a largely digital life. In fifteen minutes, Honan lost most of his digital property (photos, emails, documents and so on), and most of his ways of communicating with the outside world. Not just email and twitter, but phone calls, and text messages.
How it happened has only become clear since Friday, and presents a worrying picture of security at Apple. The initial breach, in Honan’s iCloud account, was done by someone who successfully convinced Apple support to reset the password without knowing the original password, or any security questions associated with the account. Simply put, that should not be possible. From there, however, a series of easily made but unfortunate decisions allowed it to spiral out of control.
What’s particularly scary about Honan’s situation is that, in a number of ways, he followed best-practices. His iCloud account password was unique, alphanumeric, and never got leaked or cracked. Yet he still lost everything. But there are two things which may – just – have been able to improve the situation.
Back-ups
It sounds really simple, and you have in fact probably been told it before, but back-up. Back-up everything, and preferably back it up more than once. As Marco Arment says, if you can afford a MacBook Air, iPhone and iPad, you can definitely afford an external hard drive.
More importantly, don’t confuse what are two separate services: back-up and syncing. If all your precious photos are stored on Dropbox or iCloud, that protects you against some types of data loss – dropping your laptop in the bath, that sort of thing – but not others. And frankly, most data loss these days isn’t hardware or software failure but “wetware” – your brain. It’s when you delete a file, and empty the trash, and only then realise that you actually really wanted to keep that piece of data (yes, I have done this (with my entire Applications folder (it hurts))). If you are using a backup service which deletes the backup when you delete the original, that’s not a huge help. And even worse is that many of them will delete the original if you delete the backup.
This is especially useful if you have a service – like iCloud – which allows remote wiping. If you turn on a switch which allows all your data to be erased, it’s probably worth making sure you have a plan in case you have to hit that switch. If you don’t keep back-ups, turn that off.
Password resets
If you are sensible – and many people aren’t – you’ll have different passwords for every service. Honan did. The problem is that although that removes most possibilities for losing multiple accounts, it doesn’t take away the weakest link. If Linked.In gets hacked, that password shouldn’t be able to gain access to anything else, but if your email account is hacked, you may well be screwed. Most services are designed to allow anyone with a password or access to the registered email account to log-on. Making the former secure and then leaving the latter open is not the best move. So what’s the best thing to do?
Step one is to make sure that the email address password resets go to is the most secure possible one. For most people who don’t have extra-strong security needs, that means a Gmail account with two-step encryption. Every time you try to log-on from a new computer, you get sent a text (or check a special app) with a code to finish the log-in. Unless someone steals that as well, you’re safe.
Step two is to remove password resets from that address. There’s no point having a secure email address if you can reset the password by requesting it from a less secure one. Step three is to stop using it for anything but account registrations. It will be impossible to keep it totally secure, because of the number of services which still identify you by your address, but it’s better than handing it out to everyone.
But the question that still remains is whether Apple and iCloud can be trusted at all. Following Honan’s story, it certainly seems a bad idea to link any other accounts to your iCloud. Until the company responds, however, we can’t know quite how bad it will be.
Update
Mat Honan has now made public just how the hack happened, and it’s even scarier than we thought. There are severe security flaws in Amazon and Apple’s password reset procedures that allow someone to take over both accounts with just your name, email address and billing address. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, confidential data – yet until those procedures are changed, it would be best to treat it as such, and to attempt to limit the amount of damage which would happen if those accounts were compromised.
First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Amazon then allows you to input a new credit card. (Wired used a bogus credit card number from a website that generates fake card numbers that conform with the industry’s published self-check algorithm.) Then you hang up.
Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you’ve lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account. From here, you go to the Amazon website, and send a password reset to the new e-mail account. This allows you to see all the credit cards on file for the account — not the complete numbers, just the last four digits. But, as we know, Apple only needs those last four digits. We asked Amazon to comment on its security policy, but didn’t have anything to share by press time.
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