Security Threats of Online Storage: Hacking the Cloud

The Wired journalist Mat Honan has recently had his fill of cyber hacking when someone slipped through the Cloud system’s security and into his digital life. Not only was his Gmail account deleted but the hacker also permanently reset his AppleID and Twitter passwords as well as wipe off his iPhone, iPad and Macbook remote access. This happened after the hacker contacted Amazon technical support and managed to get a hold of the last four digits of Honan’s credit card number.

Over 80 percent of 4,000 businesses and IT managers worldwide are alarmed at this recent hack attack. In a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Thales E-Security, these businesses and IT managers have considered transferring or have already transferred confidential data into the Cloud. Two thirds of this 80 percent think that the Cloud is solely responsible for protecting their confidential data and these organizations have little or no knowledge at all with regards to the security measures that their service providers have implemented to protect their clients’ confidential data.

On the contrary, developers think that service providers are not the only ones responsible in protecting clients’ confidential data. “Whether your data is on your own servers or in the cloud, it is still your data, and ensuring its security is ultimately your responsibility,” said Richard Wang, manager of Sophos Labs U.S. in an interview with TechNewsWorld.

Although there has been lots of Cloud security releases lately like those from AppRiver, McAfee, Panda, Symantec and Safenet, Agiliance Vice President Torsten George said that Cloud security is “still in its infancy. The industry still has a ways to go before organizations understand and adopt methodologies and technology to secure data in the cloud,” he added. George Tubin, senior security strategist at Trusteer said that the Cloud “must be protected by automated methods that can actually prevent malware from compromising the device.”

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