It has emerged that within an hour journalist Mat Honan was hacked and his digital life destroyed - all for the sake of being able to write silly messages on his Twitter account.

What is scary about this event is that it wasn’t that he had a weak password, it wasn’t that his password was stored insecurely, it was that multiple systems were compromised in such a short period of time.

With our lives increasingly moving into fully integrated cloud services this fate could await us all. At any time of the night or day. At the stroke of a button we could lose everything that is precious to us - Mat lost all of the photos from the first year of his daughters life. That’s just something that you can’t put a price on.

How are we going to protect ourselves? At the moment we have choice. We can share our data out evenly across multiple services because they are still in their infancy and large companies haven’t taken a firm foothold yet. This is changing though. If you own an Apple product then you probably have an iCloud account. That’ll store everything for you and it is very well integrated into the platform. It’s so easy. Why would you use anything else? How long before you can’t choose anything else - even if you want to?

Microsoft are undoubtedly doing the same thing with Windows 8 and their Azure cloud platform.

Linux users are luckier because the eco-system is fragmented. There is choice - too much in some cases. Linux users remain firmly in the minority though and this is only going to continue as Microsoft clamp down on the hardware vendors with their UEFI initiative.

As technologists we need to be cognisant of these kinds of problems and ensure that we are providing the proper solutions not the easiest ones - which will lead us down these dead ends.