The BBC News and BBC Radio 4 reported the following –

Britain is seeing about 70 sophisticated cyber espionage operations a month against government or industry networks, British intelligence has told the BBC.GCHQ director Sir Iain Lobban said business secrets were being stolen on an “industrial scale”.Foreign hackers have penetrated some firms for up to two years, he said. And he denied that his organisation had broken the law in receiving information from the Prism spy programme. Sir Iain told BBC Radio 4: “People are going after intellectual property and then seeking to translate it into national gain.”We started a couple of years ago thinking this was going to be very much about the defence sector but really it’s any intellectual property that can be harvested.”Foreign intelligence services are behind many of these attacks, according to Britain’s Security Service MI5.British businesses are waking up the threat of cyber espionage. Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT and president of business lobby group CBI, has been warning fellow businessmen about the dangers. “These threats are real, they’re sophisticated, they do financial and reputational damage,” he told the BBC.”There’s been a lot of concern around espionage in gaining information of advanced planning and design and it is critical because one of our big strengths in the UK is our design capabilities,” he added.

And yet this comes as no surprise to myself. Just look at how many social networks, large named online companies that have had data stolen by hackers. It begs the question, just how safe is the cloud and should we be using it at all. Should we only browse the internet on a dumb computer that has access to no other files or data. Should we ditch wireless connections and go back to wires. Should we use only locally based storage. Just think if we did our information would be safe!

How do you feel about your data stored or used in the cloud or cloud services?