been following bits about LulzSec.

It seems that a great many of large scale projects (especially government funded ones) seem to be lacking hugely with regards to any security aspect.

I found it amazing to read that Sony had kept all of the data that LulzSec had grabbed from their DB in plain text, and they’d managed it by a simple sql injection exploit.

Reminds me of the lax security that was abound in the lat 80’s early 90’s (during the Hackers Crack Down era) – and still 20 odd years on not a great deal has changed!

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=2362

like that. I wont use any cloud service for anything private until there is a switch that allows me to encrypt my data in such a way that no one but me can read it, especially the Cloud admins.

The silence on this matter is deafening. I’m afraid it will take the release of the data of someone famous either by improper legal access or an inside release for people to realise that the Plaintext Cloud is a bad idea.

Its only now that the massive database breaches are happening on a weekly basis that people are beginning to understand why ID Cards are such a bad idea. The general population is not clued in, and this is very dangerous for everybody.

Finally, have you seen that LulzSec has had admin acces to NHS servers for MONTHS:

LulzSec: Blacked out some important areas until they fix the problem: http://i.imgur.com/PQ6Xk.png #NHS

Yet another example of why well organized paper based systems are almost always preferable to badly thought out databases for patient information.

Now, through sheer boredom, when I worked there I had a good look through a couple of files! I discovered how much a certain boxer got paid in sports sponsorship deals. Others were less fortunate – stumbling upon gruesome details of murder cases etc.

They had great security regarding outside intruders but the threat from the inside may have been overlooked!

But why does the man care so much? What does the man want and who is he anyway?

Personally I am incredibly wary of handing everything over to third parties who I have little knowledge about. It’s bad enough renting server space from a hosting company, but at least I have some semblance of control and know what’s going on (with a bare bones server).

Maybe I’m just paranoid, or read too much sci-fi ! either way, I’ve learnt not to trust the “man”!!

Anyway, hadn’t really thought about the FREE software aspect before. As you say the cloud offers many advantages but like so many things can we trust it? Calling it the cloud seems to lull people into a false sense of security – as if it is some magical fairy dust that allows us to store data into the atmosphere.