Over the last week we have been bombarded with stories in the media about the security of hosting your business in the cloud.

The stories started a couple of months ago with a concerted attack on the Sony PlayStation network facility. Now whilst a number of people missed out on playing their favourite games no real harm was done except to the reputation of the engineers at Sony.

Recently though, there have been a couple of issues where businesses have been directly affected.

Dropping the Box

On the less severe end of the scale there were two issues this week, one with file sharing provider, DropBox and the other with WordPress.org. On June 19, 2011 a software bug caused an authentication issue with the login process at DropBox.

The problem occurred because of a new update of software at their end. It allowed people to log in without the correct credentials. The offending software was installed at 1:54pm and the fault discovered at 5:41pm, just under four hours later. It was fixed five minutes later.

I think it is important to note that unlike the Sony issue, this was not a hack attack. This was basically a mistake at DropBox who immediately corrected it once they found the problem. They have also gone to great lengths to check that no unauthorised access to people’s files happened during this four hour period.

WordPress.org provides the content management system for millions of websites around the world. It is a highly flexible, very robust and hugely popular system.

A Backdoor Into WordPress

On June 21, Read More→