Amazon and Apple Make Changes Amid Recent Hacking

The other day I blogged about Mat Honan’s recent hack and the destruction of his personal data, of interest is that the story on my blog received less attention than Steve Wozniak's claim that the Cloud is Horrendous. I guess that we are either indifferent to hacks – that we have just come to expect them – or we just do not believe they can happen to us.

The reality is that what happened to Mat can happen to anyone, all it took was some good computer skills and some creative social engineering. Well fortunately, the publicity of Mat’s plight has forced both Apple and Amazon to make changes in regards to what their customer service representatives can change. According to a recent article, Apple on Wednesday confirmed that it is temporarily disabling its customers' ability to reset an AppleID password over the phone. Customers will have to use Apple's online "iForgot" system.

According to Wired, Amazon's customer service reps will no longer change account settings like credit cards or email addresses by phone. I have been pushing for enterprises to make sure that their cloud providers are doing everything they can to ensure data protection. But I believe it is equally important to evaluate a company after an incident. How a company responds in light of a bad situation speaks to their DNA as much as the preparation they put into protecting your data.

It would have been easy for both Apple and Amazon to simply say that this issue was isolated and that their process is well founded, instead they took action and are trying to determine the best long-term course to benefit their customers. When we get in our car each day, no one plans for an accident, but we know they are part of life, equally we know that our personal data could be compromised at some point in time.

Have you ever had your credit card numbers stolen from a website (I have had my discover card number stolen about 4 times in the last 3 years)? Ultimately the credit card company makes it painless to dispute charges and quickly replaces the card and you soon forget the pain. I applaud both Apple and Amazon – while the probably should have implemented this by default – they were smart enough to respond in a way to protect their clients and not shy away from a potential fire storm.

Frank Toscano is a 15+ year specialist in cloud based services focusing on Product Management, Marketing and Security within the Cloud. He has worked for EasyLink Services and Premiere Global Services in a global role providing hosted services to Fortune 1000 clients. He is currently seeking employment with a cloud based provider in a senior level Product/Marketing role.