Cloud Hosting

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Ideally, you wouldnt store any sensitive personal information in the cloud. Theres always a risk your online accounts will get hacked, so in theory youre better off storing all your documents and data offline. But thats not really how the world works anymore, and the convenience (or necessity) of maintaining easy access to financial records, IDs, and medical documents often means taking a calculated risk.

But lots of people risk more than they need to, and end up storing quite a lot of personal information on a cloud storage service like Google Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive. If you do too, consider better protecting the data by encrypting it with a password. Well show you a few ways to encrypt sensitive files before you upload them online.

For most people, adding a password to their files offers sufficient protection. There are various easy ways to password-protect your files, but the most convenient is to use apps such as 7Zip or Keka, which let you compress multiple files into a single archive you can easily protect with a password. Your password-protected file can be accessed on any device; you just need the password to view its contents. This method works best if you have lots of files you want to encrypt quickly.

If youre exclusively dealing with documents of only one file type, you may not need to use a different app to encrypt them. For example, if youre creating sensitive doc files using Microsoft Word, go to File > Info > Protect document > Encrypt with a password. You can use a similar method with your preferred PDF app to encrypt those types of files. Be careful not to lose these passwords thoughand consider this another good reason to consider using a password manager.

Password managers such as BitWarden or 1Password offer up to 1GB of encrypted file storage on their premium plans. If youre already paying a subscription fee for a password manager, its worth exploring this option as a way to store sensitive documents. This way, you dont have to remember or store additional passwords to access them; the master password for your password manager app is all you need. Bitwarden lets you access this feature on plans starting at $10 per year, while using it on 1Password will require a plan that costs $30 per year.

Dropbox Vault and OneDrive Personal Vault allow you to create you an encrypted space for your most important files. Youll have to use an additional password or a numeric PIN to access the information stored in these folders. A OneDrive Personal Vault is available for free, but you can only upload three files into it. To get around this restriction, create a .zip archive containing as many files as you need to store (and go ahead and protect the .zip file with a password too). This limitation is removed on the paid tier for OneDrive. Dropbox Vault is only available on the paid tiers for that service.

If youre using a cloud storage service that lacks encryption, you can create an encrypted folder yourself for free. On Windows, use 7Zip to get the job done fast. Right-click any file or folder and select 7-Zip > Add to archive. Under the Encryption section, you can type and confirm the password before clicking OK to create the archive.

On your Mac, the built-in Disk Utility app also lets you do this for free. Use Spotlight Search (Command + Spacebar) to search for and launch Disk Utility. Then navigate to File > New Image > Image From Folder. You can then select any folder on your computer, and then pick 256-bit AES encryption from the drop-down menu next to Encryption. Disk Utility will ask you to type and confirm the password. Once youve done that, you should also select where youd like to store the folder from the drop-down menu next to Where. After this, under Image Format, choose Read/Write, and click Create.

This will create a disk image (.dmg) file, which can be opened easily on any Mac (as long as you have the password). The dmg file is a password-protected copy of the original folder, so remember to delete the original folder, which will be accessible without a password.

This method is probably the least convenient and most secure. Third-party apps such as Cryptomator and Boxcryptor allow you to create a secure storage space on your computer, and allow you to access these files on any device. Both services are compatible with popular cloud storage services such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and iCloud Drive.

Install the app for Cryptomator or Boxcryptor on your computer and use it to quickly encrypt any folder in your cloud storage services. For example, if you have a folder containing scanned copies of all your ID cards on Google Drive, you can add it to the app, and itll password-protect the folder.

If you want to access this folder on any other device, youll have to install the app on that device (including on smartphones), and enter the password to access it.

Even though this is the best solution from a security standpoint, you should only use this if youre ready to troubleshoot minor issues. We encountered problems when using Apples Files app, which would sometimes not allow us to access an encrypted folder on an iPhone, while Windows worked more smoothly.

See the rest here:
How to Safely Store Sensitive Files in the Cloud - Lifehacker

GiveSendGo, a crowdfunding website that was being used to source donations for the Freedom Convoy protest mounted by Canadian truckers, has been taken offline in an apparent hack and information about alleged donors leaked online.

On Sunday night, the GiveSendGo domain began to redirect to a new domain GiveSendGone[.]wtf and show a video loop from Disneys Frozen, as first noted by Daily Dot journalist Mikael Thalen. The video was accompanied by text criticizing the fundraising site and linking it to the January 6th insurrection in the US.

GiveSendGo, which brands itself the number one Free Christian crowdfunding platform, had already emerged as the go-to platform for fundraising to cover legal fees for Trump supporters accused of participating in the Capitol insurrection.

It quickly became the number one fundraising choice for the self-styled Freedom Convoy after the more prominent platform GoFundMe said it would withhold millions of dollars in donations to the truckers, citing police reports of violence and other illegal activity. Canadian banks had already begun to block funds linked to the convoy, with TD freezing two personal accounts containing more than $1 million in donor funding.

As donors flocked to the new platform, a security researcher alerted TechCrunch to the fact an Amazon S3 bucket a cloud storage service used to host files online had been set up insecurely by GiveSendGo and exposed gigabytes of data about donors to the Freedom Convoy, including photos and passport scans.

The cloud storage issue was believed to have been fixed last week after TechCrunch notified the GiveSendGo management team, and the latest hack appears to be a new compromise of the site.

The leaked donor information was obtained by data leak hosting website Distributed Denial of Secrets, which has been giving access solely to journalists and researchers due to the presence of sensitive personal information.

A copy of the data obtained by The Verge contained close to 93,000 entries, including names, email addresses, ZIP codes, and country of origin. Among the email addresses listed in the database, a handful come from domains ending in .gov, a domain reserved for government entities, and appear to belong to employees of the TSA, Department of Justice, Bureau of Prisons, and NASA.

The US makes up more than half of the entries for donor country, followed by Canada and then Great Britain, giving support to concerns raised in Canadian media that foreign money has been backing the protest.

A request for comment sent to GiveSendGo had not received a response by time of publication.

See the article here:
Funding site linked to Canadian trucker protest hacked, donor info leaked online - The Verge

I get so many of those little invoice emails from Apple that I stopped reading them years ago.

In the age of huge digital photo albums, how many people are paying Apple or Google for extra storage space for their pictures and device back-ups? The tech giants wont say.

However, the Telsyte study found 44 per cent of device users utilised cloud storage services for their digital data. Of those, more than 30 per cent paid for the privilege.

These storage plans are the product upsells of the technology universe.

Apple gives you 5GB of free storage, but that does not take long to fill before you are offered extra space for a charge. Same deal with Google, which has its free cloud storage space capped at 15GB.

Cloud storage plans also have become more feature-packed over time, resulting in price increases. The more expensive types can add up to as much as $120 a year for a family plan.

I found I was paying for both Apple and Google photo storage, which was a waste of cash.

The other hidden bill that becomes clear if you go one step further and do an audit on your credit-card statements is the amount of interest you are paying.

Almost half of credit-card customers pay interest because they do not pay off the outstanding balance in full each month.

With the average credit-card balance now at $2877 and an average interest rate of 17 per cent, that is about $430 in interest a year if you are only paying the minimum amount.

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To put that in perspective, the average electricity bill is about $1500 a year, so many people have a credit-card interest bill that is almost one-third of their annual power bill.

However, debit cards remain far more popular than credit cards. That is good because they do almost everything a credit card does without racking up an interest bill.

Doing an annual audit on your debit-card statements is a bit like moving house. It forces you to look at every item and ask yourself do I really need this?

These little purges are good for your bank balance, so why not do a Marie Kondo on your debit card at least once a year?

Joel Gibson is the author of KILL BILLS. Catch his money saving segments on Nine Radio, Today and on Twitter @joelgibson.

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Doing an annual audit of your debit-card statements can save you money - Sydney Morning Herald