Don’t get caught out like celebrities

Posted by: Mark Northall | | No Comments »

You’ll no doubt have seen the recent press coverage about personal photos of celebrities being accessed from their cloud storage. Whilst we hope that there aren’t any nude photos of you or your staff in the Cloud, how can you be sure that your cloud data is secure?

TabletCloud services, like so many other online services, are protected by nothing more than an email address and password. Mobile phones are inextricably linked to the Cloud services run by their manufacturers: Apple devices copy data across to iCloud, Windows devices copy to Microsoft OneDrive and so on. This data includes photos, videos, texts, address books, app data and settings. Clearly, this is very useful, but if someone guesses your password, they can have access to all of this from anywhere!

It is thought that a hacker gained access to one celebrity’s Cloud service and downloaded their address book. This then gave them the email addresses of several more high profile celebrities. Once you know a person’s email address, all you need to do is then guess their password.

How can you improve your security?

You can change the settings on your Smartphone so it does not back up to the Cloud. But as it’s a really useful feature, especially if you lose or break your phone, would you really want to disable that functionality?

You can enable a ‘two-factor authentication’ on your cloud services. This means that you need two pieces of information before you can sign in. The first is your regular password and the second is often a code that gets texted to you when you attempt to sign-in. Without both the password and the code from the text message, you can’t again access. Once authenticated, this will keep you connected for a day or so. Apple, Google and Microsoft support two-factor authentication for their Cloud services.

Want to find out more?

Call us on 01902 32 44 94 for a chat about Cloud or visit https://www.mbmltd.co.uk/Cloud-Services-Overview.asp

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