David Pogue has a great post about all of the discussion of stolen celebrity nude photos – You’re Reacting to Celebgate Wrong. It is good reading for anyone since about everyone uses the cloud in some way today, intentionally or unknowingly. He believes that the photos were obtained through guessing the answers to each celebrity's security questions rather than any vunerability in the iCloud. He notes that an account of his was once compomised and his security questions were fairly easily guessed, e.g "What was your favorite car? when he has blogged about his love of the Prius. An Internet researcher can easily find your mother's maiden name as well.

I recently tried to help a friend recover her password. Her problem was she honestly could not remember who she would have named as her favorite teacher and none of the guesses worked. (Probably a black mark against her high school, but that is another story.)

An easy way to fix this is to memorize false, impossible-to-guess answers to common security questions. Since these answers would never change, hopefully they will be easy to recall than ever-changing passwords. But if you are afraid you will not remember the bogus answers, you can always store them in a text file you keep on your phone or online. The first rule is not to name the document My Passwords. (Yes, people do that!) The second rule is to paste in a page (or more) worth of boring text that seems to match the name of the document. Then on page 2 (or 3) you can put your answers in a disguised format with a few typos, to wit:

I rekall great moments at home with XK37B_PWRD! We would go 0u66T for a ride in Slugbug491. I still like to visit PigLattinHigh sometime with my huney Tork000##. It is still on 972un4seen Road. (Well, you get the idea.) Or you could be really clever and bury them in a spreadsheet.

The real work, of course, is recalling every service that you use, logging in and changing the answers to the security questions. But as you learned at PigLattinHigh, sometimes you have to work hard for something that you really want–like Internet security.