Hey, you, get off of my cloud…
It was 1965 when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards penned the words to “Get off of my Cloud“.
I have no doubt that Mat Honan, a senior writer at Gadget Lab shares precisely the same sentiment [although perhaps] for very different reasons.
I would encourage all of my clients, friends and colleagues to take a few minutes to read Mat’s story… There but for….
Just last week, this very experienced writer, author and technologist was hacked, and hacked in a way that has demonstrated that the profoundly simple access to cloud computing, the “connected” solution, is also the very “achilles heel” of what is essentially a modern version of the very flaws that “personal computing” was designed to alleviate.
For those of us old enough to have lived before modern computers, [which is not that old] there is a huge irony in the fact that it was Apple’s iCloud environment that was used to compromise an individual’s personal and business records, including phone, laptop and online storage.
The marketing narrative was that “We” moved to “personal computing” to wrest control from the “mainframe”, from the corporate behemoth and overlords and allow “personal” computing to inject a more human, local, friendly and secure environment. This is fine, until you have to back up a house full of teenager’s devices and coordinate tera-bytes of music files…. The cloud is useful and important, but this comes at a price.
A price that perhaps means revisiting some of the very risks [of centralisation] that personal computing was inherently designed to alleviate.
Remember Apple’s 1984 commercial?
Anyway….
As is nearly always the case in such circumstances, human gullibility and “open” and impersonal security measures all combined to create a perfect-storm that allowed some less-than-friendly-types to “assume” enough details of Mat Honan’s “identity” to trick the operators of the “cloud” environment to allow access to key entry points.
As the Wired article points out:
The very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the Web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.
This also speaks to the ubiquity and almost universal surrender of any shred of Privacy for individuals in a modern, connected, online world. Don’t get me wrong, I am a HUGE fan and advocate of connectivity, [not-withstanding my concerns] but the ubiquity with which such [once personal] information such as Bank Account numbers, phone numbers and addresses are combined/mashed/published/shared and circulated online leads to the inevitable conclusion, as experienced by Mat Honan last week.
His personal and business records,[sadly 18 months of his young daughter’s photographs] phone, computer and online backups were wiped out, because, well, just because…..
Of course, this could have been a LOT, LOT LOT worse.
If the “hackers” chose to “live” in Mat Honan’s online identity, rather than just destroy things, even if just for a few hours or days, posting as Mat online, purchasing as Mat online, transferring online services, accounts, registrations, passwords and publications, then Mat would most surely wish he had NEVER seen the cloud, let alone got on it…
This is a salutary lesson to all of us. I congratulate Mat for having the care and concern to actually publish his experience.
Small and medium businesses that maintain little or no genuine password or customer security, individuals and sole-traders that get so busy, it just seems OK to use the same password combination for a dozen or so “important” sites, families that share accounts, even large corporations who “forget” after the third down-size and outsource of the IT group, just how easy some of this can be…
All have potentially benefitted from Mat’s experience.
I say potentially, because I fear [and experience tells me] that some will read Mat’s story, MOST, sadly, may take a glance up in to the cloud, wonder for a moment, then happily give their credit card number to the Pizza guy….
