When Wired writer Mat Honan had several of his cloud-connected online Mac, iPhone and iPad accounts hacked, the result led to a painful experience and has cloud-based software and service providers under fire for their levels of security.

ZDNet blogger Jason Perlow writes that Honan’s passwords were compromised by hackers tricking Apple support reps into resetting Honan’s iCloud account password, which enabled them into his linked social media accounts. From there they went on to post embarrassing items on Honan’s and Gizmodo’s Twitter accounts.

Human error allowed this attack to be successful, but it could have been prevented with biometric mechanisms on the devices, writes Perlow.

Adding such devices will take time, but Apple’s recent acquisition of Authentec could mean that future generations of its products will incorporate biometric authentication.

In the meantime, other biometric techniques like Visual Preferences and Mental Biometrics may prevent further similar hacking attacks.

Read more here.