Ask Slashdot: Is Your Data Safe In the Cloud?

With so much personal data being kept on the cloud, including government and health records or your source code, do you have any concerns about it falling into the wrong hands? Do you think the cloud's benefits are outweighed by continuing security issues?

Comments

Government action

[OhHellWithIt]

I believe that government seizure/examination of cloud data is even a bigger threat than hacking. With a court order or -- as we have seen in the past few years -- even without a court order, a trustworthy cloud operator could be forced to turn over our data. The article a few days ago about foreign governments being reluctant to sign onto cloud computing with an American company because of the potential for snooping into their data illustrates the point even further.

Re:Who asked this question?

[rbowen]

I didn't get to pick the question, if that's what you're asking. Presumably, if I had, it would be more about Open Source. I believe the question was chosen by the Slashdot editorial team.

Re:A little telling

[rbowen]

What does Source Forge do that is above and beyond the call of duty to protect user information? Have you guys had any data breaches that you haven't disclosed, or fully disclosed? What would you have done differently in hindsight?

When we have attacks, and compromises (which has happened in the the past) we report in detail on it in the blog. Here's one example: https://sourceforge.net/blog/update-sourceforgenet-attack/

As with any company, these sorts of things have a procedure that we have to follow, and I'm checking with the people along that trail to see what I should say in response. There haven't been any compromises or attacks during my time at SF, so I don't have any personal experience as to how we respond to this, but I've asked some of the guys on our engineering team to help me put together a response to this question.

Re:Who asked this question?

[PerlJedi]

That would be a bug, not a conspiracy. I'll see to it gets fixed.