[BetaWar]

Many of you have probably already seen the article (or one like it) talking about the Mat Honan twitter (and Apple, and gmail) account theft, but to catch people up who haven't read it:

Quote

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

So, my questions stand as such: What do people think about the days of distributed data at a large scale? Account security should obviously be paramount in most people's minds, but how much is needed? Should credit card information ever be used to identify a person? Should it ever be given out when attempting to regain (or steal) access to an account? Do you have the "Find my device" "feature" enabled on your Apple devices?

[h4nnib4l]

It's pretty crazy to see how cavalier these companies are with our information. What's sad is that it is largely our fault. People forget their digital credentials all the time, and need to have ways to regain access. People also bitch incessantly about obtrusive security measures, and Apple's complacency stems just as much from reaction to customers as it does from the laziness of its CSRs. What's really ironic to me is that I just recently turned dual authentication off for my professional gmail account, because it was "inconvenient" to deal with between my mobile devices and my home and work machines. I'm also guilty of using the same prefix across multiple email accounts. Laziness leads to this stuff, and I guess it tends to not seem that important until your identity is stolen. I've always been weary of throwing around credit card information, and will generally use PayPal for online transactions whenever possible. This does motivate me to reassess my digital security though.