Your IT Consultant

Should you Trust the Cloud?

September 3, 2014

It’s a question that gets asked a lot. The latest news has Apple and the FBI investigating a hacking incident, where the personal photos, including nude images, of over 100 celebrities were posted on the Internet. The initial reports point to a brute force attack on Apple’s iCloud service. Shocker, but Apple denies that there is a security issue with iCloud. After all, they spent almost two days investigating it. I suppose the patch for iCloud didn’t have anything to do with it either. The fact that you are allowed to make multiple attempts during a brute force attack and not get locked out must be by design.

The bigger question is…why are you putting nude photos of yourself in the cloud to begin with? It isn’t just Apple. You need to take steps to protect ANY information that you put into the cloud. This includes any sensitive, confidential or personal information, where you don’t want unauthorized people to gain access. That includes the cloud providers themselves or even the NSA. You should always be encrypting the data before you ship it off to a cloud provider. That way you control the encryption key and ultimate access to the information. Of course using two-factor authentication to access cloud storage would be a great idea too.

E-mail:   Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Information Security/Information Technology
http://www.senseient.com