Is Your Data Safe in the Cloud?

That’s the question many digital nomads are asking themselves, or should be, given news as of late. I’m reading with great fascination the recent discovery that many of Twitter’s most sensitive internal documents, which were created on Google Docs, recently found their way into the public forum due to a hacker gaining access to them. (Personal note: remember to change my passwords from 1234ABC to something a little more obscure ).

Also, today’s issue of The New York Times features an op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard and author of “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It,” on the implications of moving one’s data to the cloud. He draws a correlation of the move from PC-based data to cloud-based data as similar to the move from an answering machine on our kitchen countertop to the software-based voicemail being offered by today’s telco providers.

Many of you are probably power users of Google Docs, cloud-based to-do lists like Remember The Milk and Skype. Is the password you’re using for each of these the same? Is your password truly secure, even though it may be a pain to remember. If you’ve read the articles on Twitter’s mishap, you know that their system wasn’t hacked by using a complex software or network vulnerability. The hacker used social engineering to gain access to a person’s personal e-mail account, which gave them access to all of Twitter’s secret documents.

So, secure yourself before someone makes an example of you before the whole tech industry. Have you got a security tip for other nomads? Share them here — I’d love to see them.

TAGS: Google Docs security skype

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Comments (7)

by Ross / July 20, 2009

I think the data is safe in the cloud for the most part. As in every system though, humans are the weak point. If the hacker had not been able to get an email address from someone that wasn’t thinking, they would have had a much harder time getting in. Hacking recently is more getting through the humans than getting around the computers.
by Stephen Hamilton / July 20, 2009

I’ve been tracking the Twitter story, and I too have been thinking how this applies to my situation. I’m intersted to hear if any one uses password manager software they would recommend (or not recommend). I’d love to hear!
by Bruce Eric Anderson / July 21, 2009

Stephen: I posed your question to our 3,700 twitter followers and got some good responses. Here they are:

@TheStickMonkey @Digital_Nomads I use SplashID. I’d recommend it to anyone.

@drapps @Digital_Nomads I use Roboform on Windows & 1Password on OS X. Love them both dearly and couldn’t live w/o them. KeePass is good too.

@sempei13 @Digital_Nomads Keychain that comes with OSX rocks! It’s encrypted, but you can get your passwords out to use on different machines, too.

@JulieGomoll @Digital_Nomads 1Password is awesome. But it’s, uh, for Macs…

I can’t vouch for any of these so do some homework on them to see if they’ll fit your needs. I’ll post others that come in.
by DellServerGeek / July 21, 2009

I use Password Safe - http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ and keep it synched between my home and work machine. It stores locally on the hard drive. I don’t like the password solutions that keep everything in the *cloud* for the exact reasons you bring up in the post.

I think this will be the biggest hurdle to the real adoption of cloud based computing. The technical challenges are definitley hard, but not as hard as the security concerns.

But of course these were also concerns with online banking and purchasing things over the internet in the beginning, and we have certainly overcome that challenge.
by Greg White / July 28, 2009

If you’re interested in what others think about storing data on the cloud, check this poll periodically over the next couple months. Focused on business data and right now it is heavily against storing it in the cloud. http://tr.im/up0K
by Brad Harwick / July 30, 2009

Bruce, you might consider adding Bob Blakley to your network. He was the former Global Security Czar for IBM and now a consultant with The Burton Group. Check out their blog and any of Bobs posts….happy to make an introduction…he is my neighbor.

http://identityblog.burtongroup.com/

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by Keeping us rooted but reaching for the clouds | 信以为真? / July 31, 2009

[...] Bruce Eric Anderson, from Dell’s Digital Nomads site, uses Twitter’s misfortune as a word of warning for power-users with everything online, that the more we move things to the cloud, the more we need [...]