Prevent your files from being stolen in the cloud with these tips

Tips to protect your cloud

Taking into account all the important files that we have in the cloud, and even the backup copies that we can also keep there, it is critical to adequately protect the cloud so as not to have intrusions that could endanger our privacy and security.

Strong password and two-factor authentication

The first and most important recommendation is to use a strong password to access the service, you can use password managers with the aim of generating a secure random password, in this way, we will be protected against possible brute force or dictionary attacks that an attacker can do against our account. We must follow the fundamental advice for creating passwords, which are:

• Choose a password of 12 characters or more.
• Use uppercase, lowercase, symbols and numbers.
• This password must be unique, and never use this same password for other services, for security.

Of course, not only a strong password is important. Nowadays, most cloud storage services allow you to configure two-factor authentication, in this way, we will not only need a password, but also an authenticator application to put the temporary one-time code that it will generate. Services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, pCloudMEGA and many others support this security feature that is essential today.

Do not authenticate with external services

Some cloud storage services allow us to authenticate using login credentials from Google or social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Although the authentication is based on OAuth2 and is secure, in the event that these social network or Google accounts are compromised, our cloud account will also be compromised due to this. The best thing you can do is register and log in to the service through an email and password, with the corresponding two-factor authentication.

In the event that you have already registered and logged in, you can enter an email and later revoke the access permissions to the cloud storage service, in this way, it is as if you had registered in the traditional way, without using these thirdparty services.

Most private files encrypted at source

If you are going to upload private files such as documents, photographs, home videos and other information that is very important to us, our recommendation is that you do not upload this information directly, but instead encrypt all the data at source, so that if someone is able to get into our Cloud account and download the data, it cannot open it because it will be completely unreadable without the decryption password.

Encrypting or encrypting all data before uploading it to the cloud will allow us to:

• If someone enters our cloud account, you can download whatever you want, but the encrypted data cannot be read or opened without the access password.
• If the cloud service suffers an intrusion and its systems are hacked stealing user data, it will not affect us, because the information will have been downloaded completely encrypted at source, so they will need the decryption key to be able to read it.

Our recommendation is that you use encryption software such as Veracrypt, as it will allow us to create an encrypted container that we can then upload easily and quickly. This software is completely free and is quite simple to use, however, we leave you a tutorial on Veracrypt to encrypt files and folders.

As you can see, protecting the public cloud is quite simple since the security work is done by the company to which we entrust our data. We always recommend encrypting all data at the source, in order to avoid problems in case of intrusion or hacking of the service, since 100% security does not exist in an Internet service.