Mat Honan tells us the gory details of how he resurrected his digital life after his epic hacking.

(Source: Wired)

It’s the hack that sent ripples of panic (and a healthy helping of schadenfreude) throughout the internet: On August 3, hackers used simple social engineering to trick Amazon and Apple into providing information that would allow them to take over the AppleID of Wired reporter Mat Honan. Within minutes of securing his digital identity, the hackers erased all of Mat’s cloud accounts and assumed control of his Twitter stream.

And now this Friday [TOMORROW TOMORROW TOMORROW!] we’ll be interviewing him in a Google+ Hangout that everyone can watch and contribute to.

The video Hangout will occur at 10 a.m. Pacific time, Friday, August 17, on Wired’s Google+ page, which can be accessed here. Please add Wired to your Google+ circles, and listen tomorrow while we interview the new (and reluctant) poster boy for digital identity theft.

We want your questions for Mat! You can tweet to @gadgetlab or @wired along with the hashtag #MatHack.

OR BETTER YET, TUMBLR: What do YOU want to ask Mat Honan?

By now, you’ve probably read or heard about Wired staff writer Mat Honan’s journey through digital hell, in which hackers social-engineered Apple into giving them the keys to his digital life, allowing them to scrub his laptop, iPhone and iPad, hijack his and Gizmodo’s Twitter accounts and delete eight-years-worth of email from his Gmail account.

Honan admits to making a number of mistakes — such as failing to enable two-factor authentication and not backing up his data — that allowed the hack to escalate to the point from which there was no return.

In the hope of preventing you from experiencing a similar fate, we’ve listed a number of steps you can take to protect your data and your identity online. While nothing is foolproof — if hackers install a keystroke logging Trojan horse on your computer, all bets are off — these steps will help protect you from the tactics that Honan’s hackers used, and other ones out there.

[Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired]

“In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed.”

Read more about how Apple and Amazon security flaws led to the EPIC HACKING of our very own Mat Honan [@mat].

(Source: Wired)