Ars Technicast, Episode 8 – Life after being hacked: dealing with the fallout

The enticing promise of cloud computing is one plays on our human desire for convenience. Your data, which can include photos, music, health records –– in essence, your digital life ––  is hosted in the cloud, synced to all your devices, backed up in case things fail in your physical backups. This kind of computing would make the George Jetson scream with envy. But what happens when hackers can take away your digital life in the blink of an eye? This is what happened to Mat Honan, Senior Writer at Wired, when a hacker infiltrated his life, 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 should do to protect their data. We talk about Google’s 2-step verification as a method that can help protect users against hacks, but how in the end, there are 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices