Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 141

stores data behind an employer's irewall at an on-site data center. These
certainly do not guarantee privacy and security, but the move to the cloud
diminishes them further. It is one thing for a scholar to keep data on a
laptop or portable hard drive or, to save space and money, on a university
server. It is quite another to relocate data to the servers and data centers
of businesses with whom nothing more is shared than an impersonal,
customer-company relationship. There are many layers to the privacy and
security problem with cloud computing, including growing opportunities
to hack and steal data, incentives for companies to make commercial use
of cloud data in various forms of surveillance capitalism, and opportuni-
ties for governments to use cloud data to track people within and beyond
their borders and to apply their own laws to data originating outside their
boundaries, giving rise to a surveillance state.
A headline on the Washington Post Ideas@Innovation blog wondered,
“Is This the Year Everybody Gets Hacked?” After near-daily accounts of
one hacker after another successfully attacking the sites of some of the
biggest players in the cloud, it was hard to consider this hyperbole (Basulto
2013). After all, it was only February 21, 2013, and already Facebook,
Twitter, and the once invulnerable Apple had been hacked. Four days later,
as if in response to the question, hackers struck Microsoft. It is dificult
to say what precisely the attackers were after, but experts agreed that they
were probably looking for customer data or proprietary company informa-
tion for which black market customers might pay top dollar to better tailor
phishing attacks (M. Schwarz 2013). In April, the Twitter account of the
Associated Press news service was hacked and a tweet posted announc-
ing a White House bombing that had seriously injured President Barack
Obama. In the ensuing brief panic, stock markets dove, and both Twitter
and the Associated Press were left to issue major apologies and promises
of solutions. This hack followed closely on the heels of similar attacks on
the Twitter accounts of Burger King and Jeep (Romm 2013b).
Arguably the award for the biggest hacking story of the new year went
to a February 19 report that China's People's Revolutionary Army was
responsible for systematic hacking attacks directed against American cor-
porations and government agencies. Attacks included the theft of terabytes
of data from Coca-Cola, once involved in a feud with the government of
China. Signiicant as this strike against the world's leader in soft drinks
was, security analysts believe that attackers care more about companies