How safe is the Cloud?

Any system is hackable ultimately, but best way to avoid data such as bank details being accessed is not to store them in first place. However with internet banking, again it is only passwords that protect you. Main thing is not to leave data in obvious files called "bank details.txt" for example.

COMPUTIAC said:

You can't back up your statement as I thought.
I agree with cereberus anything in the cloud is hackable at some point. Nothing is safe there.
Does not matter how encrypted it is. The cloud maybe good for temp storage of non-essential information
but nothing more.
Anything is hackable by someone with the knowledge , time and motive to do it.

My point was not really that you should not do it, but take care and for 99+% of the time, that is all you need to do. Putting you laptop in the boot of your car where it cannot be seen is not totally secure, but significantly reduces the odds of a casual thief seeing it on your back seat, and doing an opportunistic theft. It would have to be a really determined hacker to search every file and make sense of data.

Funnily enough that reminds me of an old trick we were taught (long before we had modern encryption and secure internet etc) is if you had to put passwords in a text file, subtract each digit from 9 and reverse digits eg 1472 becomes 7258. Similarly AXJK becomes PQCZ. Even a casual thief would not crack this immediately. Mind you a longtimne since we did this!

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

If you ever heard of IBM mainframes in the past they had a security system called R.A.C.F which ran on their MVS operating system - and later variants of that OS. It was called Resource Access Control Facility. - To this day I have never heard of anybody who managed to break it (apart from possibly a rogue "system Programmer" who needed to be onsite and actually install stuff manually).

My memory of Mainframes is that most of them had pretty secure physical access so this type of break in wasn't really likely.

For reasonably unbreakable encryption -- anything using a DES algorithm will task even a modern PC to de-crypt in anything less than a geological age - try something like this (this is a Linux one - but Windows probably has equivalents).

http://www.efgh.com/software/des.htm

A 168 or 256 bit encryption system will beyond the capability of people to decrypt stuff in the time needed to do it.

(I think the well known adage of Monkeys randomly typing on keyboards producing an exact copy of the King James Bible comes to mind here -- they will do it eventually -- but will they do it within the lifetime of the Universe !!!).

Note also once Quantum Computers become a reality any sort of encryption becomes IMPOSSIBLE anyway as decryption will always be possible in microsecs irrespective of the complexity of the algorithm.

Cheers
jimbo

When I worked at IMB shops where we used RACF I never heard of any body stealing/hacking any information. In addition there was an auto feature for RACF that protected every new file instantly so that improved security.

The reason I feel safe in using the cloud is for these reasons.
1. I'm not worried that out of all of the accounts that exist on the various cloud servers mine will be randomly selected for atttact.
2.With a strong password protected file/folder I feel confident of my data security..

Think this would be easy to hack??
&pb25W@2nX

And don't bother replying Bob.. you're on ignore from now on. Argue with someone else from now on.

whs said:

I would never put any sensible data on the cloud. For that I use my external disks as my private 'cloud'.

And unless you are storing them off site they are not much use when your house burns down, where as on the cloud the data would be fine.