Why you should worry about your cloud-storage accounts
Those nude photographs may have been hacked from celebrities' cloud-storage accounts, but here is why you should care
NEW DELHI :
“My iCloud keeps telling me to back it up, and I’m like, I don’t know how to back you up. Do it yourself," said The Hunger Games actor, Jennifer Lawrence, during an interview to TV channel MTV earlier this year. Clearly, Lawrence was not familiar with the finer settings of her iPhone’s iCloud account. Most users aren’t.
A bunch of hackers targeted the Apple iCloud accounts of several celebrities, including Lawrence and American model-actor Kate Upton. The result: Very personal photographs were plastered online. The reason: Cloud-storage services automatically back up photographs from your phone to the Web-based storage.
An exasperated Mary E. Winstead, star of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, posted on Twitter, “To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves."
Let us do a pop quiz. 1. Do you use cloud-storage apps? 2. Are your phone’s photographs automatically backed up by these apps? If your answers are “Yes" and “Yes/Not Sure", you should read on.
1 Turn off auto backups
Cloud-storage apps are designed for convenience, which is why auto backups require minimum user intervention. However, if you do take the sort of pictures that you do not want all and sundry to see—selfies of you naked, lovely-dovey images—you may want to take a relook at the settings.
iOS devices: For iCloud, go to Settings -> iCloud -> Photos and see if My Photo Stream is active. If it is, all the photographs saved in your phone’s gallery are being saved on Apple’s servers as well. Turn that off.
Android: On an Android phone, things are a tad more complex. First, if you have Google’s Photos app installed, go to settings and turn off backups. Secondly, phone makers tend to integrate Facebook, Picasa, Flickr and other services into the existing apps. Go to gallery, and look for settings. Here, check to see if any services are accessing your photographs. If they are, turn them off and revoke the access.
Apps: Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) prompt the user, during app installation, to activate auto-upload of existing and new images. Go to the app settings to see if you had absent-mindedly accepted this.
2 Passwords are critical
Having “password1234" as your password makes life easy for hackers. Avoid using the same password for multiple accounts. Remember, the password for one service can also be changed by requesting a link, which is sent to the email address associated with the service. That’s a huge vulnerability if the linked email account has a weak password. To remember it better, add some numbers, perhaps the birthday of a loved one. Look at the bright side—you won’t give your spouse a reason to be annoyed.
3 Encrypt your data
Most popular cloud-storage services—Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive—do not offer encryption features on their consumer accounts. Which is why downloading a service such as Cloudfogger is useful. This is a free software that generates access keys (authentication codes) and saves them on the trusted PC. The keys can be used on the multiple devices you allow access to. Without these keys, the encrypted files cannot be opened. Even if a hacker gets into your cloud-storage account, all he/she will see are locked files with the extension “.cfog".
4 Zero-knowledge privacy
There are some cloud services that encrypt your files on the computer and then store them safely on the cloud. This is known as “zero-knowledge" privacy, because even the service administrators cannot access your data.
SpiderOak offers 2 GB free storage, and 100 GB at $100 (around ₹ 6,000), a year. Wuala by Lacie (Wuala.com) offers 5 GB storage at €0.99 (around ₹ 78) a month, going up to €9.99 a month for 100 GB.
5 Fake answers to security questions
What was the name of your first school? Honesty is usually the best policy, but if this question is asked during the sign-up process for a Web service, you should probably use a random answer. Hackers are using various methods to learn specific details about people, giving them a greater chance of cracking these questions, to enable a password change. This very method was used to hack into the celebrity accounts on iCloud. To prevent friends-turned-foes or hackers from getting access to your data, consider using incorrect answers.
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