Apple To Boost Phone Identity Verification After Recent Wired Hack
Apple initially decided to blame the phone operator who gave hackers access to a Wired journalist's iCloud account (Mat Honan). Apple has now partially blamed its phone identity verification system as a whole and has committed to improving identity verification.
Because of the lax security, hackers were able to log into Mat Honan's iCloud account. As iCloud was used for his main email, it led to much of his digital life being thrown into havoc - his old employer, Gizmodo, even suffered a attack on its Twitter feed to which Mat Honan still had access.
According to LATimes.com, after the attack, many bloggers gave some security tips to their readers. For instance, the popular tech blog Wired suggested that you should always strive to make security questions (things asked when you forgot your password) more complex, adding letters to the end of the answers, or if there are more than one question you could switch answers. After all, things like "what's your pet's name" are incredibly easy to break. Also, if a service asks for an alternative email (Gmail and iCloud both do), use it - if you can avoid security questions altogether, then that's hugely beneficial. As crazy as it might sound, why not set up an alternative email solely for account recovery? Make the password complex (for obvious reasons). If you're on a major provider like Gmail, your account won't be shut down due to inactivity.