Apple iCloud 'not secure': Cloud rains on BYOD parade

Mat Honan suffered a hellacious hack Friday. It turns out that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) reset his password for a hacker. Due to the nature of iCloud, all his devices stopped working and he's lost all his backups. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers are excoriatingly critical of Apple's security policies .

By Richi Jennings: Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Simon's Olympics...
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Jonathan Stewart tells a sorry tale of social engineering:

...journalist Mat Honan [suffered an] iCloud account breach that saw his iOS devices remotely wiped. ... Honan?s Mac, iPhone and iPad were wiped while his...Twitter accounts...spew[ed] hateful comments.
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Honan has confirmed the attack was faciliated through Apple. ... The hacker convinced AppleCare support that they were Honan. ...a scary proposition for all Mac and iOS users utilising iCloud.? ? ??

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Nick Farrell calls iCloud security "a joke":

Normally Apple would not give a monkey's...it would just pretend it did not happen. ... Unfortunately, for Apple, the fanboy in question is Mat Honan.
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It appears that in this case the fault was with...iCloud...an accident waiting to happen. A cloud system [has] to be very secure...the creators have to have detailed expertise in networking...areas where Apple is historically rubbish.
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[But] it must be secure, it said so on the Apple press release. ... The hack is anyone's worst nightmare. Honan lost everything.? ? ??

Here's Mat Honan, the horse with the mouth:

...someone got into my iCloud account. ...they remote wiped my iPhone...my iPad...my MacBook.
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Apple tech support couldn?t...stop the wipe. [or let me] log into it [or] my phone. They couldn?t do much of anything, actually. ... Apple tells me that the remote wipe is likely irrecoverable without serious forensics.
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They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass? security questions.? ? ??

But Joe White wonders how hard it is to hack iCloud:

The answer, it would seem, is ?not hard at all.?
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Honan suffered an absolute nightmare this past weekend...[it] sounds like any Apple fan?s worst nightmare. ... It?s frightening that [it] was done just by simply calling up Apple.? ? ??

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Meanwhile, D'Arcy Norman asks the obvious question:

Honan...lost a year?s worth of photos, and a bunch of other stuff. ... The attacker simply called Apple Support...and provided the Super Secure Information...his address and phone number.
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The best technical security is absolutely worthless if someone can just...reset a password based on info that is usually available to the general public...[and] have the keys to your account handed over to them.
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Why the **** didn't you have a backup?? ? ??

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And Finally...
Simon's Olympics
[no gastropods were harmed during the making of this video]

Source: http://blogs.computerworld.com/cloud-computing/20790/apple-icloud-not-secure-cloud-rains-byod-parade

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