[CatOwner]

I stand by my statement. I do not use Microsoft's online account setup (thank God for Windows 10 Pro). I don't store any photos, tax forms, and the like on a cloud server. I have whatever I need stored on multiple hard drives disconnected from my PC. They'll have to hack my network or, more likely, break into one of several locations in order to steal my photos that can be used for facial recognition.

I never said the Internet was evil. I said certain personal information should not be stored in the cloud *whenever possible*. The price of convenience is an increase in risk.

[Alas Babylon!]

Look, you do you. It does make no sense for a person to be on the cloud if everything they have and need is local.

I’m talking about big businesses, who have thousands if not millions of customers.

Do you do online banking? Do you participate here? Do you buy from Amazon, Walmart or Chase or American Express Credit Cards?

All of those feature web servers on the Internet, and I’m talking about servers—computers hosting web pages—with potentially thousands of individual transactions a minute.

I’ve been a computer and network professional for 50 years. I always thought talk of “The cloud” was a sham, because any computer connected to another over the Internet is part of a networked cloud. The term is superfluous. Big vendor clouds just use a ton of their server, network, and storage space to host other people’s applications and data, but they are no more or less vulnerable than single company servers connected to fiber or Twisted pair out to the Internet.

And that is what this attack in the thread is actually all about.

Not end users home computers.