By now you’ve seen the reports — hackers infiltrated iCloud, found and posted nude photos of dozens of celebrities.
Why should you care?
Well, what’s to stop them from doing the same at Google? Dropbox? Box? How can you protect your private photos and other personal data against hacking?
There are obviously the basic security features a cloud storage has to support — two factor authentication, brute-force attack protection, secure SSL configuration and more. This is the same for public, private, hybrid or any other cloud storage.
But the fact is, data stored in the cloud is far more exposed to hacking, as well as corporate and government espionage.
Partly this is true because of the concentration of data in just a few hands. Hack a service and the world of their data is your oyster. We’ve seen this in the past with the Sony Playstation hack. The main problem with centralized cloud systems like iCloud is that it is an obvious target for every hacker out there. If you want to get the data and private pictures of an iPhone user than this is the service and account your have to hack. It is 99% sure that you find VERY interesting personal data there. The same is true for Android users and Google services.
And, I would argue, since most of the world’s businesses have data that’s on Google or Dropbox, the bigger the target the bigger the potential monetary reward for the hackers.
Distributed and federated cloud services have the advantage that you first have to know where a certain user keeps their personal information, how this server is configured and so on and then try to attack this service. Having your data behind your firewalls, with your data protection systems in place, puts you in control. And makes your data a little harder to find.
And this is also true because no one cares more about your data than you, especially as companies race to the bottom on pricing. We already know that cloud providers are scanning our data, there have been concerns about just how secure these services are. But the fact is, cloud companies will just not fight as hard as you will to protect your data.
I think Markus, all the way back in May, laid out all these concerns in his prediction that the cloud market would slow. Is this the beginning?
Don’t let your data be caught naked i
