This was originally posted as a Facebook note. But I felt that not only would I want this to be publicly accessible, but I feel a series may be coming…
The Internet…
“…You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.” – Alec Guinness as Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi
Disclaimer – this is not a victim bashing rant. What happened to them was invasion of privacy and what I would consider breaking the law at even a constitutional level.
OK, so it’s been about 3 days (for me) being exposed to headlines about the crack that was done on Celebrity nude pics. And as stated, I am not bashing them or belittling what they are going through. But I also am not a celebrity. If you search my name in Google images, you get 2 head shots and a bunch of cats. (and a couple pictures of Hulk Hogan. Not really sure about that). If you search my real name, even less comes up. I don’t have a publicist and a team of people that is supposed to be watching out for these kinds of things.
But what I do have a working knowledge of the internet and its ways.
Should the douche nozzles that hacked their accounts be prosecuted, oh hell yes! To the farthest extent of the law. I really REALLY hate these fuckers. They make my life a living hell. Anyone that works in technology would agree. This is why I have to remember a ton of passwords and I have to spend ridiculous amounts of time the different security measures to do my job and a lot of the stuff I like to do in my spare time.
This situation will most likely make things worse.
However, this situation should also act as a reminder that the cloud is the cloud. Shaming and calling names of the douche bags that perpetrated this isn’t going to change things. If they were susceptible to this, they wouldn’t have done it in the first place. So the strategy of shaming isn’t going to fix anything. It will most likely exacerbate the issue. When you call them out, they tend to come back, and with more numbers.
The point comes down to the lessons that many of us in the IT community have been saying for awhile now. It is a matter of trust. I trust certain levels of technology because I have a certain level of understanding of it.
Does this mean that if I take a questionable picture with my phone, I am going to leave it on Google even though I am not sharing it? Hell no. ICloud, like many other backup and sharing software provides a service to help people keep from losing valuable data. However, whenever something is uploaded, no matter how secure it is supposed to be, it is susceptible to being hacked. Things of a delicate nature should be backed up to private environments or to hard formats (CD, DVD, Flashdrive, etc). Particularly if you are a person of a high profile nature. But it is important to remember that anyone could be a target.
Just today, I found out that a site that I created for keeping notes (aka a wiki site) that I had recently upgraded was being used to create users and posts for cross-linking and spamming because I forgot to put the key file back in place after the upgrade. Totally my fault. But because of this, I had to revert it off of a remote back up. Losing any data that I had produced since that backup.
And I didn’t win an Academy Award. I’m just some shmo with a keyboard.
My point being, it CAN happen to you. You can’t sit around and hope that the internet is going to be responsible for you.
We all should be able to live our lives and do the things we want to do. If that means taking private photos with and/or for the ones we love, we should be able to do that. We should expect that to remain private. But, we also need to remain vigilant and understand that privacy is our responsibility. That which we want to remain private needs to be stored privately. Even storing it locally on your computer could be potentially accessed. Strong passwords need to be in place. Access notification e-mails need to be taken seriously. (I really mean it. Don’t get pissed when Google sends you a bunch of e-mails telling you that your password has been changed and put them in the spam folder). And seriously, don’t trust Johnny not to share the sexting photos because he’s dreamy and he would never do anything like that.
That is…
Till the two of you have a horrible breakup and he decides that he really wants to stick it to you and posts all those “texts” on Facebook for all your friends to see.
We are working at and are trying to make it better. But we can only do so much.
I do not want to take away from the pain and suffering that the women that had their privacy stolen from them by piece of shit crackers.
High profile celebrities should be advised better and need to be more diligent with their private data.
(note, this is where I sound really bad)
We have people and companies with significantly harder security measures for their data and significantly less net worth / value. iCloud is NOT the environment for protecting these kinds of assets. Anyone advising that it is, should be fired, immediately.
Privacy hacking is no joke, neither is internet security. It all needs to be taken very seriously.
PS – If anyone wants more information on how to do more to secure your data, please ask. I would like to help as much as I can.