To gain access to Honan's AppleID, Phobia and his partner obtained the last four digits of Honan's credit card number through Amazon. They first called Amazon's support line and added a fake credit card account. Then the hacker called Amazon again and claimed to have lost the account password. By doing this, Phobia was able to add a new email account which then allowed him to view the last four digits of Honan's credit card.

The hacker then called AppleID and used the credit card number as well as Honan's birth date, which he obtained from a Google search, to get a temporary password. The hackers then attempted a recovery on this Gmail and used the password from the AppleID account to access his Gmail account as well as his Twitter feed.

Since the incident, Amazon has changed its policies and no longer supports changing account settings via a phone call. Apple has yet to come up with a new policy, but is currently not entertaining any AppleID password requests made over the phone.