Greetings,

From a purely nerdy perspective the landing of Curiosity on Mars was an exciting way to start the week. Security-wise, Wired ran an interesting story on the affects of our increasing reliance on technology and interconnectedness.

In brief, Mat Honan described how less than ideal security practices by Amazon and Apple combined with linked email and internet accounts led to pretty much his entire online identity being compromised along with the loss of family photos (and everything else) on his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

A positve outcome from the incident is that Amazon have since changed their policy so that customers can not change account information simply by providing a name, email, and mailing address. According to the article Apple have claimed their "internal policies" were not followed completely. However, it is not clear whether this would have provided any additional security.

Rather than relying on business policies, security must be a combined effort. At this point many of you should be wondering what can be done at an indvidual level to avoid a similar situation. Here are some suggestions rehashed and revamped from the Wired article and nicely plonked in the one spot: