(CNN) -- On Friday night, Wired technology journalist Mat Honan was brutally hacked. In a chain of events that Honan would unravel in the following days, hackers took advantage of security holes at Amazon and Apple to gain access to his iCloud account. They then took over his Gmail account, remotely wiped all data from his MacBook Air, iPhone and iPad, and took over his Twitter account as well as the Twitter account of his former employer, Gizmodo. The incident might seem small on its surface -- just one person's information, not a huge data breach of credit card numbers. But this one very public incident, thoroughly documented by Honan in a Wired article, could be a wake-up call to many who store their information with cloud-based services, including Amazon, Apple and Google.
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Hackers use possible Amazon and Apple security holes to delete tech writer's data
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Hackers use fairly basic techniques to accomplish the hack
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Apple: "We found that our own internal policies were not followed completely"
They found Honan's home address and e-mail address online, and after some back and forth with Amazon tech support, used it to get the last four digits of @placeholder's credit card number.
The .Me account was Honan's backup e-mail for his @placeholder account.