A few minutes after doing the live spot on Nova 100, I recorded an interview on the alleged Apple iCloud hack for ABC Radio’s national current affairs program AM.
Reporter Emily Bourke would have gone away with a disjointed mess of soundbites, but the disjointedness isn’t so important when it’ll be edited into a multi-voice report.
I think this one quote best summarises my view of the compromise we enter into when using cloud services:
The big problem with creating massive online cloud storage systems — which is now the way we do things on the internet, whether it’s Apple or Microsoft or Google or Amazon or whoever — is that you create a vast honey pot of a target for the attackers.
Once you find one way to get in, you can potentially get access to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people’s data.
The plus side is such concentrated services means they can hire some of the best security people they can find, putting brains onto the problem is obviously important. So at one level the cloud providers can, if they do it right, protect things far better than you or I could on computer systems under our own control.
The failures are therefore going to be far less frequent. It’s just that when the failures do happen they can be catastrophic.
Here’s the full story, served directly from the ABC website, where you can also read the transcript.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.7MB)
The audio is of course ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
A few sentences of my comments were also used in a later report on The World Today at lunchtime, which featured security researcher Troy Hunt.