How to avoid being hacked like Honan.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

I read about Mat Honan, the journalist who had his email hacked and his devices wiped. What should we all be doing to avoid this kind of thing? Sarah Taylor

For those who missed the story, Wired journalist Mat Honan had his Gmail and Twitter accounts hacked, which is not all that unusual. What made the story "epic" was that the hacker(s) used his Apple iCloud account to perform a "remote wipe" on his iPhone, iPad and MacBook, deleting all his data. Worse still, he didn't have backups.

It was evident that something had gone wrong from the tweets the hacker sent from Honan's Twitter account and Gizmodo's account, to which it was linked. (He used to work there.) Honan went public on 3 August 2012 in a blogpost: Yes, I was hacked. Hard. At the time, he blamed his old seven-digit alphanumeric password.

Honan followed up on Monday 6 August with a full account in Wired: How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking . It turned out that it was not a password crack but "social engineering". The hacker had phoned AppleCare technical support and been given a temporary password to Honan's .Me account. Honan says: "It did this despite the caller's inability to answer security questions I had set up. And it did this after the …