Tulsa Expert: Access To Personal Information Just A Password Guess Away

All across Green Country people trust “the cloud” to hold their private information, and as we've seen recently, it's not as secure as we might have hoped.

Some of the nation's top computer security experts with the National Security Administration and other federal agencies have been trained at the University of Tulsa, and they all have advice on how you can protect your privacy.

The cloud is really a bunch of servers, and depending on what settings you have on your phone, everything you do there could be stored in the servers; and all of that information is just a password guess away from hackers.

University of Tulsa Ph.D. Gavin Manes is CEO of Avansic, a company that does CSI on computers.

"You may own that material, it may be your's, it may be private to you, but you're giving it to someone else for them to control,” Manes said.

He said your private data in the cloud is a password hack away from being public, and the apps you're downloading might give hackers a way in.

"Why does this application need access to my device ID, and my phone, and my contacts and my calendar," Manes said.

That's how hackers could have gotten into some celebrities' phones recently - through the popular Find My iPhone app.

"The apps give certain privileges and rights to that program that you're installing on your device, that you may not be fully aware what those privileges are,” said Manes.

Mauricio Papa is Director of the Institute for Information Security at the University of Tulsa. He said if those celebrities had protected their passwords with two-step verification that asks for a code along with your password to log in, then their hacked photos might have stayed in the cloud.

"If the persons that had been affected had been using that, they would've received on their iPhone a code, and at that point in time they would've realized someone was trying to access their accounts,” Papa said.

You can also control what floats into the cloud through your settings, but Manes said you should beware, those settings reset every time your device is updated and once it's in the cloud it's there for good.

"Anytime you put something on the Internet, you may own it, but you can't control it anymore,” he said.

Your bank probably already uses two-step password verification, and now many other popular sites are as well.

You can set up two-step password verification on:

• Facebook
  
• Google
  
• Twitter
  
• Apple
  
• Microsoft
  
• Dropbox
  
• Evernote
  
• Tumblr
  
• PayPal