At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere. When I set it up, years and years ago, that seemed pretty secure at the time. But it’s not. Especially given that I’ve been using it for, well, years and years. My guess is they used brute force to get the password (see update) and then reset it to do the damage to my devices.
This was truly a full-throttle attack on Mat here. I’ve heard many reports of emails getting hacked into, but this is just terrible. I hope Mat recovers most, if not all his data.
And remember kids, let this be a lesson that no amount of backup is enough backup. There are a lot of options available today, so pick as many as you can and backup that data.