On another Mac, we opened our Web browser and logged into iCloud’s Web interface using the iCloud account of the primary system account on the Mac. We set it to the primary user account (not the one we created for this test) and then closed System Preferences. Doing so prompted OS X to inform us that Find My Mac can only be activated on one user account per machine. This is done by heading to System Preferences > iCloud and checking the “Find My Mac” box. Our first step was to turn on Find My Mac. Curious about whether Find My Mac would wipe the entire drive or just the user account, we added a second account to the Mac, with both set as administrators. Our victim for this test is a 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro on OS X 10.8 with two internal drives (we used an Other World Computing Data Doubler to replace the optical drive with a second hard drive) - a 240 GB OWC Mercury 6G SSD as the main system drive, and a 1 TB Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT HDD for data storage - and a 2 TB LaCie P’9230 external Time Machine drive connected via USB. We set out to answer these questions by wiping one of our own Macs. How does the process work? Does it wipe all drives connected to the Mac or just the system drive? Is the data recoverable?

Honan indicated that his data, which was unfortunately not backed up, was likely lost for good, it got us wondering about what exactly happens when a remote wipe is triggered via iCloud. We’ve known about remotely wiping iOS devices since the introduction of Find My iPhone in 2009, but Find My Mac, and the corresponding ability to initiate a remote wipe, was introduced only last fall as part of the new iCloud service.Īfter Mr.

Last week’s news that Wired journalist Mat Honan had his Mac remotely wiped as part of a devastating attack by hackers raised many questions about the heretofore little discussed topic of remotely wiping a Mac via Apple’s iCloud and Find My Mac service.

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