Did you read Mat Honan's tale of woe last week? The one where his Amazon, Apple, Gmail, and Twitter accounts were hacked and his digital life was eradicated?
If not, I strongly encourage you to read his story. In a nutshell, hackers strung together pieces of information to gain access to several important online accounts. The results were personally devastating for him. But his story is a good lesson for all of us. After learning the details of the attack -- from one of the hackers himself, no less -- Honan says he regrets three things most of all.
1. Turning on Find my Mac, which let the hackers erase his MacBook.
2. Not creating regular, local backups of his MacBook, including his photo library.
3. Not using Google's two-step verification, which would have prevented the hackers from getting into his Gmail account and perhaps his Twitter account, the true target of the attack.
That last item is a good reminder for anyone who uses Google for e-mail and its ever-growing suite of apps. Two-step verification (also called two-factor authentication) adds another layer of security to your account. With it turned on, you (or a would-be hacker) would need to take two steps to log into your Gmail account. First you'll input your regular password, followed by a single-use, six-digit code that gets sent to your phone immediately whenever you try to log in. Th... [Read more]
via CNET http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/NnTv/~3/-3ZytFidELo/
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