Apple on Wednesday said that it had temporarily disabled the ability for customers to reset their AppleID passwords by contacting customer service over the phone, after a hacker used this technique to break in to a technology journalist’s account over the weekend.
The company said that for the time being, customers can do password resets on a website instead.
“We’ve temporarily suspended the ability to reset AppleID passwords over the phone,” Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We’re asking customers who need to reset their password to continue to use our online iForgot system (iforgot.apple.com). This system can reset a password in one of two ways– either have a password reset sent to an alternate email address already on record, or challenge the customer to answer security questions they had previously set up. When we resume over the phone password resets, customers will be required to provide even stronger identify verification to reset their password.”
This move comes after Mat Honan, a technology writer at Wired, reported that a hacker broke into his Apple iCloud account by calling Apple’s tech support and providing the last four digits of his credit card, which they obtained by breaking into his account at Amazon.com.
This post has been revised to reflect the following: an earlier version of this post incorrectly described the way that the hackers obtained the last four digits of Honan's credit card number. They broke into his Amazon.com account; Amazon does not make that information public.
Rico says some weasel always has to fuck it up for everybody else...
No comments:
Post a Comment