The part right before your quote says:
I stored my credit
cards with the merchants I
used for faster transactions. I didn’t enable
two-factor
authentication on Google or Facebook. I never set up
dedicated (and
secret) e-mail accounts for password
management.
So he is now
storing credit card info somewhere else,
enabling two-factor authorization and
setting up separate
email accounts. He may be doing other things, but they
aren't mentioned here. And he does say:
I’m a heavy 1Password
user. I use it for
everything. That means most of my passwords are long,
alphanumeric strings of gibberish with random symbols. It’s
on my iPhone, iPad
and Macbook. It syncs up across all those
devices because I store the keychain
in the cloud on
Dropbox. Update a password on my phone, and the file is
saved
on Dropbox, where my computer will pull it down later,
and vice
versa.
Notice how everything is in present tense? He is relying
on
two things:
1. His passphrase is secret, and
2. Hackers won't be able
to break into his 1Password
account.
The clueless part comes from being
hacked on the cloud, and
keeping everything on the cloud. True, he is now doing
backups, but everything is still on the cloud! The drawback
to having data
only local is that if I lose it, it is MY
fault. The drawback to having data on
the cloud is that if I
lose it, there are billions of suspects, but only one
person
responsible: ME!
If you want to keep your data secure, keep it to
yourself.
If you want to keep a secret, don't tell anybody. The cloud
is an
attractive proposition - I don't have to do any work.
Well, he found out that
he couldn't trust the cloud to keep
his data safe from unauthorized people, and
he still puts
his data back on the cloud.
Plus, he is now a target. The
last thing you want to do is
draw attention to yourself. After getting hacked
in the
cloud, he goes out and tells everyone, including his hacker
and
associated friends, just what he has done to prevent
losing more data.
It
will take them longer this time. After all, they have to
crack his backup
scheme first, so that all the backups he
has are empty or corrupted. Patience!
But then they can do
the whole thing all over again.
I have recommended this book before: John
McAfee's "Computer viruses,
worms, data diddlers, killer
programs, and other threats to your system: What
they are,
how they work, and how to defend your PC, Mac, or
mainframe".
Although it came out in 1989, I still think it
covers the basics of security in
a way that most people can
understand. To implement high security, you need
technical
skills. To get started, and to know what high security to
implement,
you need to read this book, or something like it.
One of his rules says:
You will be hacked. Don't make
yourself an attractive target. Words to compute
by!
A note on the term "cloud". I remember making diagrams back
in 1990 that
had a nice prominent "cloud" symbol for the
Internet. It was common
representation back then. Calling
Internet storage simply "the cloud" is like
calling an
operating system "Windows". It preempts a commonly used term
and
gives it a different meaning.
--- Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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