Memories Lost in the Digital Beyond--A Record of the Honan Incident (2012)

Memories Lost in the Digital Beyond--A Record of the Honan Incident (2012)

In 2012, WIRED magazine reporter Matt Honan was leading a cutting-edge life dependent on the cloud and social networking. One day, however, his iPhone suddenly initialized and he was unable to log into iCloud. Soon his iPad and MacBook were also remotely erased, and his daughter's growth records, family photos, and eight years of Gmail were lost. The culprit was a teenage hacker who calls himself "Phobia. He had only one goal: Honan's Twitter handle, @mat. The attack began with just a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card, and then used Amazon and Whois information to successfully impersonate the user. With the rapid proliferation of smart devices and the cloud in the early 2010s, we have become so accustomed to convenience that we have overlooked its vulnerabilities. Honan's case is emblematic of the essential problem of cybersecurity that modern society faces.