Are there criminals hiding in the cloud

The Canadian woman convicted of killing her friend after police saw she had posted a picture of the murder weapon - her belt - on Facebook shows how suspects are not only exploiting technology but increasingly being snared by it too. Here are some more examples of how technology has led police to suspects and how criminals have fallen victim to their own stupidity, ignorance and vanity.

A thief who stole more than smartphones at a music festival was detained after revellers with iPhones tracked them using an app that comes with the phone. The Find My iPhone app shows the device's location on laptops or other devices. Police had already dedicated extra resources to Coachella after "chatter on social media" about missing iPhones, Sgt Dan Marshall told tech news site Gizmodo.

Several phones were returned immediately, Indio Police added, while the rest were handed to lost property at the festival site. In , police in California recovered a stolen laptop after being handed clues to its whereabouts along with pictures of a suspect thanks to a stealth software program.

Cab driver Muthanna Aldebashi, 27, was snapped on the Mac device's built-in camera after he powered it up. The Mac's rightful owner Joshua Kaufman, an Oakland interaction designer, had installed software called Hidden, which supplies the computer's location, photographs taken on the Mac's internal camera and shots of the Mac's screen display. The program immediately began sending Mr Kaufman photographs of a bearded man with shaggy dark hair sleeping on a couch, sitting shirtless on a bed in front of the computer, and driving.

The software also sent Mr Kaufman - who has blogged about the theft - a screen shot showing the man logging into his own e-mail account - information investigators later used to lure him into an arrest. Thieves who steal electronic devices can find themselves literally facing justice simply by using them. There have been numerous reports of stolen smartphones and laptops being recovered after photos taken on devices are automatically uploaded to the owner's iCloud account.

In Randy Schaefer had an iPad, a laptop and some cash stolen from his truck parked in Houston, Texas. The thieves gloated by taking selfies and recording themselves with their booty. He uploaded the content and handed the evidence to police, who later arrested the two men, according to local media. So, is it completely secure? Anything else? Can the cloud computing company access the data it stores? Do governments have access to encrypted data now?

Like what kind of ways? How can people protect data they store in the cloud? Though data stored in the cloud are already encrypted, even greater security is possible. People can encrypt their data before loading it into the cloud and unencrypt the information when the data is retrieved. The same software used to encrypt data can be used to determine whether a file has changed since it was uploaded. That way, people can tell if their data has been tampered with. Having a hard-to-guess password remains a good way to protect sensitive data.

People can also become more familiar with the security provisions of cloud service providers and pick a provider accordingly. Take a deep dive Ready to store more knowledge?

Know it all? Prove it. Storing data in the cloud means: c. Which of the following is not an advantage of storing data in the cloud? Data is stored in multiple places in case hardware breaks or part of a system is compromised.

The data is completely secure. No system is foolproof. The software that encrypts the data could be hacked or someone with access to the data could misuse it, for example. People can protect the data they store in the cloud by: a. Monero and XMRig are the most common accounts for cryptomining against cloud resources, hence activity involving lesser-seen coins and tools may be more likely to go undetected. A range of telemetry in both product deployments and custom honeypots were captured, which allows to see trends relevant to cloud defense purposes.

Threat actor campaigns continue to evolve A variety of malicious activity originating from known adversary groups and malware families were observed: Botnet and custom miner : A new cluster of activity was recently discovered, linked to an adversary group campaign of infecting hosts, primarily through common cloud services, with a custom miner and IRC bot for further attacks and remote control. This cluster shows operations are evolving on many levels, including efforts of hiding botnet scale and mining profits.

This is indicative of attacks growing in size. Docker image compromise : A threat actor backdoored legitimate Docker images in a supply chain-like attack. Networks running the trusted image were unknowingly infected.