This is a world where everyone wants to get to know you better. Not because they love you, but because they want to use you.There are government agencies spying on you to find out your political leanings. Marketing agencies monitor you all over the Internet to find out your advertising interests. Then there are hackers who want to use your accounts for their dirty jobs – thereby indicating to you as long as they stay safe. In such a world, you need something to protect your data. This post explains what CloudSweeper is .
Content
- What is CloudSweeper
- CloudSweeper Review
- Basic Audit
- ClearText Password Audit
- CloudSweeper Review – Verdict
What is CloudSweeper
CloudSweeper is a research project that aims to clarify the potential risks associated with placing emails with sensitive data (mostly passwords) in one of your online mail account folders. Based on some algorithm,
- It calculates the net worth of your Gmail account (including Google Plus) if hackers were to sell information;
- He then indicates what steps you should take to protect your account; as well as
- It helps with encryption of sensitive data so that hackers cannot extract your personal information.
However, I felt that this service only offers some of the security as it focuses on email passwords. Our emails often contain a lot of other sensitive data, such as postal addresses. Sometimes even a person’s email address can be sensitive. For example, you use two email IDs – one for personal conversations and one for business. In this case, if the personal email id is made public, your purpose will be lost and there is a high chance that this account will contain a lot of data about you and yours.
In short, CloudSweeper is a research project funded and implemented by the University of Illinois at Chicago. It verifies your Gmail account (only) and tells you: a) the value of your information to hackers; b) how to protect your email account. Plus, if you choose, CloudSweeper will encrypt your emails.
CloudSweeper Review
As explained above, it offers three services: 1) determining your Gmail value; 2) Tell me how to protect your data; and 3) encrypt / decrypt your email in Gmail. For now, the service seems to only work with Gmail. It is asking for permission to read your Google+ account, so I guess it is scanning the Google Plus account.
Basic Audit
In my case, when I ran CloudSweeper Audit to figure out the value of my Gmail, it first presented me with an OAuth dialog asking for permission to access my Gmail account and Google Plus account. It then provides you with an informed consent page that asks for your permission to use non-personal data for research purposes. You can either accept it or deny it. This does not affect the audit process in any way. I saw no harm, so I accepted it.
To my surprise, my Gmail account showed $ 0.00. I have had emails containing my Amazon account details and multiple emails containing my address information etc., Registered by domain name registrars.
The above highlights the fact that CloudSweeper only scans your emails for passwords and nothing else. Please let me know if you find it behaves differently in your case.
The same results page also suggested using a password manager to use different passwords on unsecured sites, and several more suggestions were made.
ClearText Password Audit
This is similar to the above, except that instead of calculating the cost of your Gmail, it offers you encryption of confidential emails. This test found three passwords in my Gmail. Therefore, it is likely that basic auditing does not take care of all passwords, or ignores simple websites. Anyway, I had three options:
- Encrypt messages
- In what he calls edit messages, the ability to remove passwords from emails
- To do nothing
If you choose to encrypt your passwords, you will be provided with the encryption key in the form of a QR code, which you can print and then use a QR code reader to decrypt messages. This part works well.
CloudSweeper Review – Verdict
With good privacy auditors in this area, CloudSweeper only covers Gmail at the moment . In addition, it only checks passwords and skips other information such as postal addresses, etc. However, it doesn’t require anything and does its job perfectly. It is recommended to run at regular intervals to see if you are vulnerable. I would like this service to be extended to other email service providers so that I can be completely confident in his / her safety on the Internet.
