IF someone at Apple screwed up then I'm fine with them making it a major story, but only if they can prove it was an Apple screw up. At this point the deck is still equally spilt on yea or nay.
More like, it's split between "Apple is guilty. We don't need facts - Apple's a big, bad, incompetent firm" and "There are not enough details to reach any conclusions".
This story has an extremely misleading introduction. Apple are not "partly" to blame. Apple are entirely to blame.
When the hacker was unable to answer the security questions,
According to Mr Honan the attacker couldnt answer the security questions but which questions are we talking about. Was this the ones that Mr Honan put in when he set up the account. Or something more secure. Maybe the hacker did know the answer but didn't know the birthdate and convinced the tech he put in something made up and can't remember what he put to get to another level where he had the info, provided publicly by Mr Honan, to correctly answer all the questions
We have only Mr Honans vague comments at this point about what went down and given that he's a known blogger and supposed to be an expert and just showed his ignorance for not having a backup, of course he's likely in damage control and going to tip the blame away from himself
I think it's much more sinister. Need to know the exactly when this started so the exact point time when iCloud became self aware can be documented... How else will Kyle [Reese] know what to tell Sarah to tell John?
I think If it was this easy, why not someone else?. Why not a whole lot of other accounts?
It just happened to be the one Jizzmodo?
Other hacks have surfaced since yesterday, and older ones have been drug up, but no details to prove they were even remotely the same
As for this, it wasn't says the 4chan source an attack on Apple but on this guy personally. Just happens that he is an Apple user so we aren't reading about his nexus, tab and dell being screwed with
To me looks like Honan got a friend to pretend to be him, let him know the answers and trick the tech support to do all that stuff and then come as a victim and generate some attention... Look at his tweets.. he is not anger at all, like he doesn't care about his lost of data.. Anyone else would had the blood pressure up high, it would be totally normal to be angry. But Honan is not..
Then, the use of the word "hacker" exaggerated... yes... Guy didn't hacked that equipment, not iCloud, tricked a tech support agent.. But thats it.
I sure hope that AI is not going to make this a major story. Yes, a tech support guy (or gal) screwed up. Yes, Apple is going to tighten the process. But AI is going to blow this way out of porportion. AI give it a rest......
AI hardly covers anything critical of Apple or their processes, and the forums are even less tolerant. The worse thing to happen would be for this to be ignored. Having all of your devices wiped is not exactly something that can be 'blown out of all proportion'. Apple has not taken security seriously, because they have this misguided belief that no one would want to attack Apple or its users. That is unfortunately not true anymore.
ICloud as a service is extremely flawed. If nothing else the service should have a way to backup to an owners Mac OS machine. Further saving a copy of an iCloud file locally shouldn't be so damn difficult. ICloud is like 80% of the way there but Apple certainly missed important use cases and seems to have forgotten about user control.
OSX 10.8 scares me because it took years of information off my computer and placed it on Apple servers. I discovered this transfer because my computer slowed to snail pace accessing this information.
When I started turning off the iCloud connections suddenly I am faced with warning messages that I am going to lose my years of collected information. What??? Since I have no other devices Mail was my central concern. Turning off the store on server options resulted in my information disappearing. Whoa!!!
A bunch of clicking and copying later I got most of the information back but not in convenient formats. Turning off store functions, at first stopped email from being sent. Reboot fixed some of that. What a mess.
My private information in hacker rich territory, how is that a good deal?
Then the traditional information sync problem that technology has been trying to solve since the 1960s, who is the chicken and who is the egg? Which information is original which is modification? A trail of change, a trail of trial and error from multiple sources. Should be fun to see what turns out to be unintended consequences.
Here's a collection of comments from people who have doubts about this story. I missed a few, but clearly Gizmodo has a credibility problem around here.
The whole story stinks. Starting with the obfuscatory term "social engineering." WTF is that supposed to be?
To me looks like Honan got a friend to pretend to be him, let him know the answers and trick the tech support to do all that stuff and then come as a victim and generate some attention... Look at his tweets.. he is not anger at all, like he doesn't care about his lost of data.. Anyone else would had the blood pressure up high, it would be totally normal to be angry. But Honan is not..
Then, the use of the word "hacker" exaggerated... yes... Guy didn't hacked that equipment, not iCloud, tricked a tech support agent.. But thats it.
I was quite worried by this story until I saw the bit about it being a Gizmodo article. I used to be a big fan of that site until the stolen iPhone incident. However now I don't trust that site at all. They are a bunch of Apple hating crooks and I couldn't care less about what they say.
Any time I see a story link to a Gizmodo article, I automatically ignore.
It would be interesting to see how the supposed social engineering worked. If it was guessing the security questions it would be the user mistake. Otherwise I doubt if calling Apple would work easily, let's see what his excuse is. I bet we will find out that he gave some information, which could be used on the phone, to somebody to do this.
The whole thing sounds so rehearsed. Somebody worked out that if you got someones email iCloud or other - you could use it go retrieve other emails, and reset passwords, and close down systems. Since the iCloud password couldnt be hacked he is claiming some kind of social engineering. Possible, the people in AppleCare might relent with someone who genuinely forgot his password and had lost email, if there was some other information which only the user should know.
So I could see this happening, if it didnt then some people would lose their iCloud for ever. However, how likely is that it happened to a gizmodo journalist, and not to a random guy on the street who then called gizmodo? Think about that. There are no known social engineering cases except a journalist for Gizmodo.
I have 2TB on my iMac...that is not going to work and iCloud files are different from ALL files on your Mac.
I don't think that's what was being suggested. The post you were responding to suggested putting a copy of your iCloud files on your hard drive - which shouldn't be a problem for most people.
I agree, however, with your sentiments. I don't see iCloud as a viable solution right now. The older iDisk was great - information was automatically mirrored from your computer to the cloud and you could buy massive amounts of space for relatively little. (although you'd probably not want to mirror your whole 2 TB to the cloud). There are other solutions now, but they're not quite as transparent or convenient.
OSX 10.8 scares me because it took years of information off my computer and placed it on Apple servers. I discovered this transfer because my computer slowed to snail pace accessing this information.
What evidence do you have that Apple transferred your information to iCloud? They only transfer what you allow them to do.
The slowing you witnessed was probably Spotlight indexing your hard drive - but that information is never sent to Apple.
Here's a collection of comments of people who have doubts about this stroy. I missed a few, but clearly Gizmodo has a credibility problem around here.
The whole story stinks. Starting with the obfuscatory term "social engineering." WTF is that supposed to be?
'Social Engineering' is the phrase for "I was stupid and gave my password or personally identifying information to someone".
Good Strong password....... is another way of saying your information is likely to be attacked and its best protection is a password? Really!!! Thats like standing on FreeWay convinced your reactions will save your life every time. Why place your life, your information at risk for so little gain?
'Social Engineering' is the phrase for "I was stupid and gave my password or personally identifying information to someone".
Exactly, which means that he's not playing with a full deck with this story. It's nowhere near proof of anything, but fakes usually give themselves away by using language like that.
By the way, as of last night, he seems to have snagged Gruber.
Comments
LoL
Quote:
Originally Posted by GTR
LOL.
That's twice.
LOL, indeed. So obvious you can't even bring yourself to explain.
More like, it's split between "Apple is guilty. We don't need facts - Apple's a big, bad, incompetent firm" and "There are not enough details to reach any conclusions".
According to Mr Honan the attacker couldnt answer the security questions but which questions are we talking about. Was this the ones that Mr Honan put in when he set up the account. Or something more secure. Maybe the hacker did know the answer but didn't know the birthdate and convinced the tech he put in something made up and can't remember what he put to get to another level where he had the info, provided publicly by Mr Honan, to correctly answer all the questions
We have only Mr Honans vague comments at this point about what went down and given that he's a known blogger and supposed to be an expert and just showed his ignorance for not having a backup, of course he's likely in damage control and going to tip the blame away from himself
All very horrible except for Gizmodo's Twitter getting hacked.
On edit: As others have hinted, it sounds like an inside job.
Gizmodo would do anything for a few extra ad clicks.
I think it's much more sinister. Need to know the exactly when this started so the exact point time when iCloud became self aware can be documented... How else will Kyle [Reese] know what to tell Sarah to tell John?
Other hacks have surfaced since yesterday, and older ones have been drug up, but no details to prove they were even remotely the same
As for this, it wasn't says the 4chan source an attack on Apple but on this guy personally. Just happens that he is an Apple user so we aren't reading about his nexus, tab and dell being screwed with
Quote:
Originally Posted by plokoonpma
To me looks like Honan got a friend to pretend to be him, let him know the answers and trick the tech support to do all that stuff and then come as a victim and generate some attention... Look at his tweets.. he is not anger at all, like he doesn't care about his lost of data.. Anyone else would had the blood pressure up high, it would be totally normal to be angry. But Honan is not..
Then, the use of the word "hacker" exaggerated... yes... Guy didn't hacked that equipment, not iCloud, tricked a tech support agent.. But thats it.
I would not put it past them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ed Steinberg
I sure hope that AI is not going to make this a major story. Yes, a tech support guy (or gal) screwed up. Yes, Apple is going to tighten the process. But AI is going to blow this way out of porportion. AI give it a rest......
AI hardly covers anything critical of Apple or their processes, and the forums are even less tolerant. The worse thing to happen would be for this to be ignored. Having all of your devices wiped is not exactly something that can be 'blown out of all proportion'. Apple has not taken security seriously, because they have this misguided belief that no one would want to attack Apple or its users. That is unfortunately not true anymore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by muppetry
Now that should not be possible. If it's true then I'll bet Apple are scrambling to roll out some new training.
They will make this a teachable moment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
ICloud as a service is extremely flawed. If nothing else the service should have a way to backup to an owners Mac OS machine. Further saving a copy of an iCloud file locally shouldn't be so damn difficult. ICloud is like 80% of the way there but Apple certainly missed important use cases and seems to have forgotten about user control.
#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }I have 2TB on my iMac...that is not going to work and iCloud files are different from ALL files on your Mac.
#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
BREAKING NEWS: Someone just hacked NASA's iCloud account and used Find My Rover to erase Curiosity's drive.
Did you notice last night at JPL that if you saw a laptop, it was a Mac?
OSX 10.8 scares me because it took years of information off my computer and placed it on Apple servers. I discovered this transfer because my computer slowed to snail pace accessing this information.
When I started turning off the iCloud connections suddenly I am faced with warning messages that I am going to lose my years of collected information. What??? Since I have no other devices Mail was my central concern. Turning off the store on server options resulted in my information disappearing. Whoa!!!
A bunch of clicking and copying later I got most of the information back but not in convenient formats. Turning off store functions, at first stopped email from being sent. Reboot fixed some of that. What a mess.
My private information in hacker rich territory, how is that a good deal?
Then the traditional information sync problem that technology has been trying to solve since the 1960s, who is the chicken and who is the egg? Which information is original which is modification? A trail of change, a trail of trial and error from multiple sources. Should be fun to see what turns out to be unintended consequences.
The whole story stinks. Starting with the obfuscatory term "social engineering." WTF is that supposed to be?
I don't think that's what was being suggested. The post you were responding to suggested putting a copy of your iCloud files on your hard drive - which shouldn't be a problem for most people.
I agree, however, with your sentiments. I don't see iCloud as a viable solution right now. The older iDisk was great - information was automatically mirrored from your computer to the cloud and you could buy massive amounts of space for relatively little. (although you'd probably not want to mirror your whole 2 TB to the cloud). There are other solutions now, but they're not quite as transparent or convenient.
What evidence do you have that Apple transferred your information to iCloud? They only transfer what you allow them to do.
The slowing you witnessed was probably Spotlight indexing your hard drive - but that information is never sent to Apple.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Flaneur
Here's a collection of comments of people who have doubts about this stroy. I missed a few, but clearly Gizmodo has a credibility problem around here.
The whole story stinks. Starting with the obfuscatory term "social engineering." WTF is that supposed to be?
The guy writes for Wired, a publication with significantly more credibility than Gizmodo... or AI for that matter. Let's see how it's explained there.
'Social Engineering' is the phrase for "I was stupid and gave my password or personally identifying information to someone".
Good Strong password....... is another way of saying your information is likely to be attacked and its best protection is a password? Really!!! Thats like standing on FreeWay convinced your reactions will save your life every time. Why place your life, your information at risk for so little gain?
Exactly, which means that he's not playing with a full deck with this story. It's nowhere near proof of anything, but fakes usually give themselves away by using language like that.
By the way, as of last night, he seems to have snagged Gruber.