Cloud computing massively increases risk of data loss

So says Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at data security specialist Imperva. "Although the data breach appears to have been discovered in early June, here we are in late July – six weeks later – reading about a breach affecting more than half a million cardholders, around half of the Internet service company's customer base," he complains. "As the dust settles on this major data breach – which appears to be right up there alongside the Heartland Security card data breach of the start of the year – heads will undoubtedly roll," he adds. Just as important, Shulman suggests that the problem "is that the rise of cloud computing – with many more companies now hosting their data on the Internet – makes such databases and the servers they are hosted on, phenomenally attractive". He suggests that attackers are aiming for the big prizes – the servers. "Instead of dealing with a site here and there, once they broke into the hosting servers, all the sites were open to them. The lesson: once you've penetrated the cloud, you've got an easy path to the important, underlying data."