Is cloud hackable?

Yes hackers love the cloud!

Cloud services aren't fundamentally vulnerable because they're badly designed; they're vulnerable because they are used by people who can easily be manipulated via social engineering. For a skilled hacker, a major company’s cloud system is a treasure trove – sensitive data, including millions of bank account logins, email addresses and Social Security numbers can be just a few clicks away. While the cloud provides unprecedented benefits to digital businesses, it can also leave customer and employee data vulnerable. If your business uses cloud services and you don't educate your staff, you might as well kiss your data and your reputation goodbye.

Major data breaches at tech giants like Yahoo , which confirmed in December 2016 that more than one billion of its email accounts were compromised in August 2013, demonstrate that no company is completely safe from a hack. Oracle, Sony, T-Mobile and Dropbox are just a few other consumer tech companies that have dealt with massive hacks in recent years. Retailers such as Target, Neiman Marcus and Home Depot have also experienced massive breaches of customer data. And the average internet user, unaware of their data’s vulnerability, has yet to take the necessary steps to protect their information.

While the technical approaches to hacking have changed radically over that time frame, the social engineering techniques needed to access information remain fundamentally the same.
"What's different in cloud from a security view is when you're renting software-as-a-service, you've given away the management of security to a third party,""Do you want to outsource the responsibility for security? You can't outsource the responsibility; you can only outsource the function. That doesn't mean security can be ignored, because in the end it's your brand and your reputation that's on the line if there's a data breach." "The big issues for a cloud-based model is the ability to largely log in from anywhere, and the fact that's mostly delivered through a browser,"

In most cases, the credentials are trivial. In most cloud environments, there's no concept of intrusion detection or prevention, and if they are there people don't know how to use them." Those technologies are also meaningless if attackers blag legitimate login credentials through social engineering. The problem with the cloud is that it simply expands the systemic vulnerabilities that have existed since the Internet was developed.  The internet was built for redundancy, not security. So every single hack since then has been patched, but the vulnerabilities remain and continue to increase. Until people take back their data and assume responsibility for it, they have little recourse against the large providers.The risk of losing key information in a cloud hack will only increase as more companies and consumers embrace the technology. A recent study by Skyhigh Networks, a cybersecurity firm, found that 18.1% of all documents uploaded to cloud-linked systems contain sensitive data. In a poll conducted last October, 27% of respondents said they or someone within their household had credit card information stolen from a store’s data servers.
With so much raw data relegated to the cloud, major firms are developing “machine learning technology” to automatically scan billions of cloud interactions for potential threats. However, Stealing credentials by hackers can be accomplished through targeted attacks. "Spear phishing is massively increasing as a primary entry point technique. However, in many cases more basic techniques, such as ringing up and pretending to be a worker who has lost their remote login credentials, can be equally effective.

What can be done for protection. Turn users into a human firewall. Invest time and money into getting users to understand why these attacks take place, that they are real, and how to resist them. Even obvious steps, like ensuring the internet connection is encrypted in public locations or using individual passwords for different services, can provide a benefit. With the rise in identity theft, malware and phishing and scam sites, users need to be more careful than ever for their cyber protection.The most important thing to do is choose strong passwords, and change them often.

Cloud computing- an introduction for beginners!

Basic Understanding

If internet is a vast ocean, cloud computing is an island which shares an organization within itself. Its a collaboration on the internet.Cloud computing, often referred to as simply “the cloud,” is the delivery of on-demand computing resources—everything from applications to data centers—over the internet on a pay-for-use basis. Its a metered service so you only pay for what you use.

Traditional business applications have always been very complicated and expensive. The amount and variety of hardware and software required to run them are daunting. You need a whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure, and update them. When you multiply this effort across dozens or hundreds of apps, it’s easy to see why the biggest companies with the best IT departments aren’t getting the apps they need. Small and mid-sized businesses don’t stand a chance.

With cloud computing, you eliminate those headaches because you’re not managing hardware and software—that’s the responsibility of an experienced vendor. The shared infrastructure means it works like a utility: You only pay for what you need, upgrades are automatic, and scaling up or down is easy. Cloud-based apps can be up and running in days or weeks, and they cost less. With a cloud app, you just open a browser, log in, customize the app, and start using it. Businesses are running all kinds of apps in the cloud, like customer relationship management (CRM), HR, accounting, and much more.

In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer's hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet.
What cloud computing is not about is your hard drive. When you store data on or run programs from the hard drive, that's called local storage and computing. Everything you need is physically close to you, which means accessing your data is fast and easy, for that one computer, or others on the local network. Working off your hard drive is how the computer industry functioned for decades.The cloud is also not about having a dedicated network attached storage hardware or server in residence. Storing data on a home or office network does not count as utilizing the cloud.

For it to be considered "cloud computing," you need to access your data or your programs over the Internet, or at the very least, have that data synced with other information over the Web. In a big business, you may know all there is to know about what's on the other side of the connection; as an individual user, you may never have any idea what kind of massive data processing is happening on the other end. The end result is the same: with an online connection, cloud computing can be done anywhere, anytime.

Some other major examples of cloud computing you're probably using:


Google Drive: This is a pure cloud computing service, with all the storage found online so it can work with the cloud apps: Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Drive is also available on more than just desktop computers; you can use it on tablets like the iPad or on smartphones, and there are separate apps for Docs and Sheets, as well. In fact, most of Google's services could be considered cloud computing: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and so on.

Apple iCloud: Apple's cloud service is primarily used for online storage, backup, and synchronization of your mail, contacts, calendar, and more. All the data you need is available to you on your iOS, Mac OS, or Windows device (Windows users have to install the iCloud control panel). Naturally, Apple won't be outdone by rivals: it offers cloud-based versions of its word processor (Pages), spreadsheet (Numbers), and presentations (Keynote) for use by any iCloud subscriber. iCloud is also the place iPhone users go to utilize the Find My iPhone feature that's all important when the handset goes missing.


Amazon Cloud Drive: Storage at the big retailer is mainly for music, preferably MP3s that you purchase from Amazon, and images—if you have Amazon Prime, you get unlimited image storage. Amazon Cloud Drive also holds anything you buy for the Kindle. It's essentially storage for anything digital you'd buy from Amazon, baked into all its products and services.

Cloud Computing Standards

The standards for connecting the computer systems and the software needed to make cloud computing work are not fully defined at present time, leaving many companies to define their own cloud computing technologies. Organizations choose cloud providers that satisfy their needs. Cloud computing systems offered by companies, like IBM's "Blue Cloud" technologies, for example, are based on open standards and open source software which link together computers that are used to to deliver Web 2.0 capabilities like mash-ups or mobile commerce.
Organizations such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) and Open Grid Forum (OGF) are a few of the many organizations that have suggested some type of standard or suggested guidelines.

Common Cloud Service Models

Cloud services are typically deployed based on the end-user (business) requirements. The primary services include the following:

Software as a Service (SaaS)

A software delivery method that provides access to software and its functions remotely as a Web-based service. Software as a Service allows organizations to access business functionality at a cost typically less than paying for licensed applications since SaaS pricing is based on a monthly fee.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

A computing platform being delivered as a service. Here the platform is outsourced  in place of a company or data center purchasing and managing their own hardware and software layers.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

A computer infrastructure, such as virtualization, being delivered as a service. IaaS is popular in the data center where software and servers are purchased as a fully outsourced service and usually billed on usage and how much of the resource is used.