UPDATED 14:10 EDT / MAY 16 2011

How Secure is the Personal Cloud? Apple, Dropbox #FAIL

Some pretty major security concerns have been circling the cloud these past couple of months, and now Dropbox also got caught up in the loop. Christopher Soghoian, a researcher at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, claims that Dropbox has some serious privacy issues concerning user data, and asked the FCC to look into the matter.

In a 16-page filing, Soghoian said that Dropbox employees have access to files users have uploaded in an unencrypted. Something which, if true, can potnetiolly have a major backlash on Dropbox’s 25 million users.

Soghoian cited a number of changes made recently to Dropbox’s Terms & Services:

“Nobody can see your private files in Dropbox unless you deliberately invite them or put them in your Public folder” was modified to be “Other Dropbox users can’t see your private files in Dropbox unless you deliberately invite them or put them in your Public folder.”

In his claim, Soghoian also noted two more similar changes including the addition of a disclaimer. It seems that he may have a case, and PGP Inc co-founder Jon Callas even closed his Dropbox account in light of these changes.

Security is a major concern in the cloud, and Dropbox is only the latest service to cause an outcry. Yet another example is the location-based tracking issue, that involved the unsecured preeminent storage of users’ location data, and triggered at least a couple of lawsuits against Apple and Google. The former addressed this issue with a recent IOS path, but this aspect of user privacy even got some attention from Congress.

When talking about personal cloud cybersecurity breaches, Sony cannot be left out of the list. In what is possible have been the largest scale hack in history, personal and financial data of over 70 million users may have been compromised, at least to some extent.


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