Are We Putting Too Much Trust in the Cloud?
Posted by Tollfreenumber.ORG at May 3rd, 2014
News of the Heartbleed bug has shaken up the internet over the course of the last few weeks and it’s become apparent that very little has been left unaffected. In fact, just a few days ago Robert McMillan filed a report in Wired that Heartbleed has even been found in home cloud storage devices such as Western Digital’s My Cloud device. And it’s not just devices like these; any device utilizing OpenSSL can be affected. Cloud services have oft been promoted as the wave of the future but recent developments have made everyone begin to reexamine its supposed benefits and experts have finally started to question just how safe our personal information really is.
The response to Heartbleed has been swift and patches have already been released on numerous devices to remedy the problem. However these patches are only a balm for the symptom. Unfortunately they do nothing to address the real problem; the very nature of cloud storage leaves it inherently vulnerable to theft and attack. In an article posted last December, Businessweek reported on contests that have been held by the security company CloudPassage to see who could hack into a cloud server the fastest. In just 4 hours the winner of the contest was able to hack into the server by tricking the system into thinking he was an administrator.
If a similar situation were to happen in the real world, the hacker would have total access to any and all data found within the cloud server. Your private photos, financial records, and whatever else is stored in the cloud is up for grabs for anyone bold enough to come along and take it.
It’s a scary situation but why, you may ask, is a toll free service provider covering this story? What does toll free service have to do with cloud storage? Over the last few years, several companies have popped up and begun advertising toll free cloud services. Most of these companies are simply co-opting the word to capitalize on its popularity when in fact they provide nothing more than questionable VoIP service. Other companies do provide genuine cloud services and it is because of this that we’ve begun to question the legitimacy of cloud-based toll free services. In light of what has recently occurred it seems that the cons of cloud-based toll free service may greatly outweigh the claimed benefits. Even more frightening is the fact that most cloud-based toll free service providers store data on servers outside of the United States, thereby bypassing federal protection laws. Coupled with tricky end-user agreements that allow cloud providers ownership over data stored on their servers, small businesses stand to lose sensitive business information to possible competitors. On top of that, most small business owners aren’t even aware of what’s going on. They’ve been intentionally left in the dark, misled into believing that their data is safe and secure in the cloud.
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Category: News