Windows 10: How safe is the Cloud?

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!

 

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. *Wink

 

Thank you all for your replies!

 

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

 

This is 2016 not back in the old days when hacking someone's account was not even a thought process.

Its not about only one account being hacked on the cloud.
It is all the account's being in jeopardy if someone hack's the cloud as a whole.

Think about how you have the OS and all your files on one SSD.
The SSD decides to fail.

What do you lose ? Everything on the SSD is gone.

Same thing with the cloud and all your file's saved on it, all gone.
Not just yours but, everyone's on it.

Now how safe was it ?

 

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.

 

In my country we live in houses not in cracker boxes. They don't have the habit of burning down. I cannot even remember when the last house did burn down. So that house burning scenario would be my last concern.

 

Houses in Florida don't burn down?

Regardless, it's not the house itself, it's the contents in the house. Rugs, tables, chairs, drapes, even the paint on the walls might be able to catch fire and burn, burning your data with it.

 

Hi there
Data can be destroyed / removed in other ways too -- House can get burgled, flooded, earthquake damage, sinkholes, traffic accident damages house and you have to relocate for a while etc etc.

However in most of these scenarios I think you'd have a lot more to worry about than losing a load of data on a few HDD's. There's nothing wrong in using cloud servers for some stuff - but it can and DOES get hacked -- the companies don't publish this information of course -- why would they. So I'd never store any PERSONAL info on the cloud. Multi-media etc is fine for that purpose.

Most of the sensible cloud servers have backup sites etc - but with people looking for ever cheaper ways of doing things you might end up with some smaller companies (and not so small too) running poorly protected sites on the cheap in some third world country with hideously low wages and not the best quality of staff.

Even in places like India which has a huge amount of off shored I.T and a reasonably qualified staffing level one can go into some of the more dubious areas of big cities and buy lists of credit card numbers + pin codes and all sorts of "other data" for a few USD in any old cafe.

Your own data at least backed up and physically stored away from any machine is about as secure as it gets.

I have copies of business transactions, tax stuff etc -- and I always store another physical copy elsewhere - the probability of BOTH copies going missing plus the data on machine as well are vanishingly close to zero.

Cheers
jimbo

 

If One Drive were hacked, it would definitely get publicized. But the biggest risk is your own credentials, which if someone has acquired those they can access your cloud storage. They can get them through Trojans or malware on your computer, or maybe you use the same username and password on multiple sites and one of those sites gets hacked and hasn't properly encrypted their userfiles.

 

Everyone has choices, mine is not to use the cloud, IF my house did burn down, I've have more serious problems to worry about than what is on my computer. I prefer to keep my personal stuff right here, on different hard drives. Not out in space.
Must be a TRUST issue with me *Smile Do I trust Onedrive?? Not a chance in.....heck. *Smile

 

In Florida is just my vacation home. My real home is in Germany - like this -

 

Explained in a simplified way, a cloud (in IT) is a remote storage location for any data. It can be a server owned by Microsoft for Office 365, Outlook.com or OneDrive users, or anything similar. The data is stored on remote servers and you access it over the network; you can sync parts or all of it to a local storage (HDD / SSD on your PC), but even if you lose the local storage, the data is still stored on cloud servers.

But that's not all: if you have ever used email, if you have joined our forums, if you have ever read an article at CNN.com, in general if you have ever used Internet, you have already used cloud.

When you join these British forums (yes, the company who owns these forums is not American!), you need a browser. You tell your your browser to contact a cloud server over the Internet (those are in the US!) and retrieve the data you want to access, a page on these forums of ours. You click a screenshot in a post to open it from the cloud server, it will be shown on your local computer but you don't have to store it locally on your PC.

The same with your emails. When I send you an email, it will be in the cloud. You open your email application or browser if using web based email, see the title of my message and click it; this will retrieve the message from the cloud, in this case your email provider's server, and show it to you.

Basically everything on the Internet is in the cloud.

Microsoft is one of the major players in the game. If we clients could no longer trust cloud service providers like MS, the modern computing would be in big trouble. The cloud part of the Office 365 subscription is the OneDrive; it's then up to each individual user to decide if he / she wants to utilize this wonderful space saving 1 TB storage each Office 365 user gets or not.

I use OneDrive extensively, saving all my personal data, documents, videos, pictures and music alike in OneDrive. I can access my data from any device, if my computer crashes it's not a big deal because everything is still there, in the cloud.

OneDrive as cloud storage is much safer than your local PC can ever be.

Guys, I am willing to make a bet. The terms:

I give you control of my PC in a Skype meeting, giving you credentials of one of my Office 365 / OneDrive accounts. You sign in using my credentials and my browser (easy to organize in Skype meeting), we need to be online at the same time because to sign in to my accounts you also need the Two-Step Verification code sent as a text message to my mobile phone.

When you have signed in, you can change the password of my account to whatever you want to. Again, we need to be online at the same time because this, too, requires the security code sent to my phone. Then I will remove cookies and the sign-in information from the browser and the bet can start.

From that moment I give you 30 days time to get in to my account, using any method. If you manage it I will pay you $1,000. If you don't get in, you pay me $1,000. OK? To make this fair let's together select an unbiased fellow member and we all send first the $1,000 to him / her to show we are serious, and then start counting. You have 30 days, you have my MS account email address and it's password, all you have to do to get my $1,000 is to sign in and take a screenshot to prove it. If you cannot manage this in 30 days, I will get your money.

I'm sure you both are more than willing to do this! Basically, in my honest opinion you should either accept this bet or stop telling that it's not safe, that my MS account / OneDrive is hackable. If you think so, prove it. Show me one article, blog post or similar with factual information that an MS account with Two-Step Verification has been hacked. You must have some facts to support your statements!

Wishing you a nice evening, anticipating a cash flow,

 

I must decline you proposal based on the above.

 

I was expecting a reply like that. But: hacking to my MS account when I even give you my credentials (except the phone that receives the security codes) must be far easier than to hack in to MS systems. To get the money you don't have to do that impossible task, just hack in to my account.

You cannot mean that you could not do it?