Sunday, August 12, 2012

A Persistent Hacker and the Destruction of an Online Life

Mat Honan, a senior writer at Wired and a former senior reporter for Gizmodo.com, learned the hard way on Friday evening that hackers had taken over his entire online life. They took over his Twitter account. They cleaned out his entire Google account and Gmail inbox. His iPhone, iPad, and MacBook were completely wiped. He has lost years of files and, more important, photos of his daughter.
"I was in my daughter's bedroom and I was playing with her and I saw the phone power down. At first I thought the battery died. I went and plugged in the phone and when I did that I got the 'activate your phone' screen," Honan told ABC News in a phone interview. Honan then grabbed his MacBook and saw alerts that his Google account password was incorrect. His MacBook then powered itself off. When he grabbed his iPad he got the same screen...

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