This story is one that too often occurs these days.  It is just tragic what happen to the gentleman in this story.  I could only image what it would feel like to be violated in the manner that Matt Honan was.  Just as Matt felt most deeply hurt by the photographs that he lost, I think that losing the photographs would have impacted me in the same manner.  My wife and I have almost 57,000 photos that we have taken digitally and several hundreds more in actual photos.  I have backed up all of our photos unto a few external hard drives.  I feel lucky for never being a victim of being hacked and having my digital life taken over and I hope that it never happens to me.

I was blown away by the fact that Phobia was easily able to hack into Matt’s digital life using some of the most popular giants in the digital world.   You would think that it would be a little more difficult to hack into someone’s email address, I Cloud, or whatever else is gets hacked.  It is true that with a little of the right information you get access to a lot of things.  I have been hesitant to link accounts and to get involved with sites such as Twitter but I know that there are many people out there in the world who just can’t get enough of these types of sites.  In my opinion when your life revolves around the digital world you become vulnerable to being hacked unless you practice security measures that would make you a hard target for someone who is looking to hack someone just because.

I also believe that it is important to back up your personal computer and important digital content, regardless of what it might be, on a regular basis to ensure that you know that if ever you were to become a victim of being hacked, you have your digital life backed up in a safe place.  I think that it is important that people who spend a lot of time on their computers plugged into the internet that they should ensure that they have security measures in place to protect them from threats.

Unfortunately Matt, like others who have been victims of similar hacks would like to go back and back up their digital life.  What is interesting about this article is that Phobia explained the method that he used to hack into Matt’s digital life and how he was able to do it with ease.  The companies that allowed this to happen should be embarrassed; they should look at their security measures and make them more stringent.  Another interesting thing about this article was that Matt agreed not to press charges in exchange for the knowledge of how he hacked.  It was interesting to hear that Phobia felt bad about what had happened to Matt after the fact.  It did not seem to matter to Phobia as he was hacking Matt’s digital life.  Hopefully Matt learned a very hard lesson.

Matt has done a great thing by telling his story of how he got hacked.  I definitely took a lot from this article and interestingly enough I was not aware of how easily someone can take over your digital life if someone really wanted to.  The key important factor about this article is assessing your digital life as it is now and determining if your digital life is at risk of being hacked.  The other important lesson from the experience that Matt had is to not assume that your digital life is safe.  You are always at risk of being hacked but it is the security measures that you implement before that will make you less of a target of being hacked.