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Security Guide

diGital iS Forever

Have you ever told a friend something and asked numerous servers until it is delivered to the intended recipi-
him or her to keep it private? Most people have. Unfortunately, ent. It will also be stored on a data farm owned by the com-
at some point, the person you confided in violated your trust. pany whose app you’re using. You can never withdraw this
He or she shared that information with someone else. If so, information—and once it is transmitted, it is nearly impos-
you can probably recall the horrible feeling that accompa- sible (and in most cases, impossible) to delete.
nied the thought of other people knowing things you wanted Think about it this way. Have you ever heard the saying
kept private. that “two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”? Well,
This is how several A-list celebrities felt when scores of from a technology perspective, “two can’t keep a secret if one
their personal and highly sensitive photos stored in iCloud of them is the Internet.” Anything shared over the Internet
were hacked and subsequently plastered all over the Internet. morphs into a digital zombie, destined to wander the far
You may be wondering how this could happen—how could reaches of cyberspace forever!
cybercriminals access the private data of someone else stored You may think that as long as you are sharing messages
on an iCloud account? or photos with a trusted party you have nothing to worry
It turns out there was a security vulnerability associ- about. Unfortunately, our digital world is rife with cybercrim-
ated with Apple’s Find My iPhone application. Safeguards inals who spend countless hours trying to steal data from
had not been implemented by Apple to limit the number of both companies and everyday citizens (just ask the Apple
login attempts permitted before an account would be locked, iCloud victims).
a common security practice used to prevent
hackers from entering endless combinations
of usernames and passwords in an exhaustive
attempt to guess the correct set of credentials
(referred to as a brute-force attack). 50
The celebrities affected by these attacks
are still trying to remove their private data from
the Web. The sad truth is that their private data
will never completely be removed. Even more
sobering is the fact that anyone who chooses
to transmit any personal information using an
Internet connection (i.e., send something via
email, post something on a social media site,
etc.) can become a victim, too.
Privacy? What’s That?

Once you click the button to send an email,
post a photo, or share a video, you lose control
over that data. It can be copied, shared, and
copied again. Your data will travel through
Source: valdis torms/Fotolia and vilisov/Fotolia

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