Bangalore: The hijacking of Wired reporter Mat Honan's iCloud account made big news this week. His account was hacked via a security flaw in Apple and Amazon's security policies, which allowed the hacker to pretend to be Honan and obtain access to his email account and AppleID.

The hacker, who is called Phobia, said that the aim was to publicize security exploits, so companies like Apple and Amazon will fix them.

He started by wiping Honan’s iPhone, iPad and MacBooks in an attempt to gain access to his Twitter account, which has only three characters (@mat).

After recovering his account, Honan managed to talk to the hacker who explained how he hacked the accounts. He said that one can get into any email associated with Apple.

Phobia first looked up Honan’s Twitter account and guessed his Gmail account. From there, as Honan did not have two-factor authentication turned on, he was able to view his backup email address, which was also Honan's AppleID.