If you don't have an up-to-date backup of your important data, then this tale of woe should encourage you to make one over the weekend.
A couple of weeks ago I reported the story of Matt Honan. He's a smart guy and former journalist for Gizmodo and former contributing editor to WIRED magazine. Hackers got into his iCloud account and used that to remote wipe his iPhone, iPad and MacBook before going on to create more mayhem. The hackers got into his account by basically phoning up Apple and pretending to be Honan and asking them to reset the password.
I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions.
“Social engineering” is a fancy word for tricking the person on the other end to do what you want by making them believe that they are you.
Nothing can protect you from this kind of targeted attack. You can have the best password possible, and awesome security questions, but if the hacker can convince the tech support person that they are you, they can walk past all that security.
Scary thought!
But what happens afterwards? Well, as it turns out Honan had a lot of irreplaceable data on his MacBook, cherished possessions such as photos of him and his baby girl.
Stuff that money can't replace. Stuff that hurts to lose.
While money might not be able to replace his photos, it was able to allow him to recover the data. He approached data recovery experts DriveSavers who took his the hard drive from his wiped MacBook and were able to retrieve some 75 percent of the data off his drive. What does this translate to in the real world? Here's what it means to Honan:
I didn’t get everything back. DriveSavers was only looking for the things I specifically requested. I’ve lost all my applications, for example, as well as long-established preferences and settings that have been moving from machine to machine with me. But that’s OK. I can live without them. I can buy them again. Whatever. Besides, sometimes it’s nice to start with a clean slate, and I spent yesterday installing a new, clean operating system on my MacBook Air.
The bottom line is that I have all my photos and all the home movies I’ve shot. Every one of them. And seemingly all of my most important documents as well. That felt like a miracle.
That incredible level of data recovery didn't come cheap though.
The bill for all this? $1,690. Data doesn't come cheap.
The moral of the story? Data loss prevention is better -- and cheaper -- than the cure.
If you have precious data on your computer that's not backed up to at least one separate place -- another PC, an external hard drive, a cloud backup service -- then you are playing Russian roulette with your data and you will eventually lose. Ideally an off-site backup is preferable because it protects your data from loss in the event of fire or theft, but a quick backup of your important stuff to an external hard drive -- which you can buy starting at about $70 -- is far, far, better than nothing.
Do yourself a massive favor and go check the state of your backups. Make sure that your precious digital data is safe. Do it before you're faced with a massive recovery bill.
