On Sunday, August 31 2014, several celebrities had their privacy breached when their personal and sexually explicit photographs were stolen from their supposedly secure cloud-storage accounts and splashed over the web. This naturally caused outrage and sparked a great deal of fear among many people, as it was initially suggested that the pictures were stolen by means of exploiting weaknesses in the storage account’s system.
However, it has subsequently come to light that there was no weakness in the system itself, but these accounts were hacked by exploiting the users’ accounts themselves. So we can at least take comfort in knowing that the systems so many of us rely on are not as vulnerable as we first thought. We can only hope that the perpetrators will be traced and justice will be served.
Yet in an age when we are progressively putting ever more faith into cloud storage and trusting third parties to keep our data safe, should we be concerned that hacking attacks such as the “celebgate” scandal will become more commonplace and eventually be a widespread issue?
There have been many high-profile hacking scandals in the press over the last few years, Edward Snowden, the Leveson Enquiry, and so forth, and thankfully the authorities have undertaken thorough investigations and surveillance operations to locate the perpetrators and bring them to justice. But is it ever really possible to crackdown and prevent hacking?
It seems that the more sophisticated the security becomes to protect against hacking, the more sophisticated and devious the hackers become. Sunday’s incident has been blamed on a lack of diligence paid by the victims resulting in exploiting their secure credentials. However, given the fact that we’re all regularly inundated with emails and digital communications, it can be easy to miss a malicious email that was designed to access your personal data.
To keep ourselves safe, we need to be increasingly more aware of our own actions and pay more attention to our digital activities. We must think carefully about where we store our data and take any precautions necessary to keep our personal details secure.
