What do Google, Amazon, and Apple have in common? Well, they are probably the three companies I use the most in my day to day digital life these days and chances are the same for you. But they are also the way that hackers were able to break into someone's iphone, ipad, macbook, twitter account, and gmail account within about 30 minutes, permanently deleting and destroying almost 9 years of a Wired writer's digital life (including the entire collection of photographs of the first year of his child's life). What can be learned here to prevent this from happening to you? 1. Setup 2-factor authentication on your gmail account. Yes, it is a royal pain in the ass. But you have too much to lose if your email account is hacked (I can only guess you have credit card #'s, SSN's, home addresses, passwords, etc. buried in your emails). I'd suggest the same for Facebook.

2. Shut off "Find My Mac" as it seems particularly dangerous and unsecure

3. use different passwords for different accounts (especially the important ones). I cheat here and use slightly different variations of the same core passwords which should protect most

4. backup your files OFFLINE. Cloud storage and backup is convenient, but at least once a month back everything up that you would not want to lose (think pictures) to a DVD or external hard drive that no hacker can get access to

5. Spread the news about this, it's the only way that companies like Amazon and Apple (particularly guilty here) will change their policies. A particular pet peeve of mine is the "security questions" needed to reset passwords, many of which companies give you no options for and are things that can easily be discovered via a web search. We need to force companies to do better, there is too much at stake

Here is the original post from the wired writer for the complete story