Friday 5 September 2014

Celebrity Leaks from iCloud - is the cloud secure?

Further to recent reports in the press of the leaking of personal photos and videos from the iCloud service this has prompted me to think of a few things regarding security and the type of information that was leaked.

First though, I have just seen a news article stating that Apple will be tightening security after the recent leaks, but is this too little too late?

I don't personally use iCloud, the cloud services I use are Microsoft services which includes the OneDrive cloud storage solution so I am writing from the perspective of a non-user of the service that was affected and these opinions are all my own. I use my OneDrive as a back up of my photos and documents, but after reading about the content of some of the pictures etc that were leaked I don't feel that is the appropriate type of material to be storing in a cloud environment.

Reading the article it wasn't the security that was breached but passwords were guessed or the accounts were hacked into via phishing. This is an ideal time to remind you to ensure your passwords are very strong, don't use things like your date/place of birth or your name and don't click on any suspicious attachments in any emails you receive.

Cloud services are secure I've been using them for a while now personally and for work, it's down to users to ensure that they do the best they can to protect their accounts.