Sunday, July 19, 2009

Security in the Cloud

Another good read: The Anatomy of the Twitter Attack. This is the first of a two-part techcrunch post about a recent Twitter hacking, where 300 confidential docs were stolen by a hacker and sent to, among other places, TechCrunch's email inbox. This article outlines how the hacker managed to get in, the next post promises to deconstruct Twitter's reaction to the theft.


The punchline is that (a) businesses increasingly relying on a mix of cloud services for hosting their documents, and that (b) each of these web services has a moderate level of security, but when viewed in aggregate, their security is seriously compromised.

It's a facinating read, in itself, but also makes me wonder what the implications are for online games and game services. If your identity games or game service becomes linked to your identity in other more significant places, will those be back doors to identity theft or other serious crimes. Will those running such games or game services safeguard my account info as well as my online bank? Will they legally be required to? Some say those games are actually banks anyway, so they may need to be.

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