EA Forums Online Security Newsletter - Volume 8

Very interesting. I always wondered what cloud gaming actually is. 

The beauty of renting is flexibility. Just as you can move from a one bedroom apartment to a bigger place when your needs change, you can scale your cloud usage up or down instantly.

Need more storage? Just pay for the next plan. Need less? Scale down and stop paying for unused space.

But just like renting an apartment, you’re still responsible for what happens inside your space. If you leave your door unlocked, that’s on you. 😉

📘 I enjoyed last month’s edition, and this one feels just as relevant. Cloud services touch almost every part of modern gaming, so understanding the risks and protections is crucial. 🎮⚡

Re: Game saves the cloud is great. I always use it when available.

One thing I read just yesterday I would like to point out. For details please Google.

MS Office (All current versions) now automatically save everything, word, excel etc in the cloud. However it's not made clear and it needs to be manually disabled by going through several menu options.

A lot of tech guys/support are furious about this because it's now by default, but MS never announced it. It saves to one drive, (the only cloud service used for Office), limited to 5GB free. Next is 100GB storage for some fee.

The thing is this has caused a lot of problems with regular heavy users and businesses who don't wish to keep senstitive stuff in the cloud. That's bad enough, cloud saving without any announcement by MS, but what's just as bad is that when the 5GB is full data has been lost, crashes and all sorts of weird things. For details please check out Techspot or just Google.

But it is something that every user of office should be, no, needs to be aware of. 

Finally, I'll just say that these technical support professionals get called to customer, small business etc, check the one drive cloud status. User is shocked because they had no idea what was going on, and somehow when 5GB is reached it leads to various problems. I don't know how data could be lost as there will be a local copy. But I don't know, and dont use it.

Just a heads up. MS wont' announce it, or haven't yet. 

This is about the newsletter only. Firstly, thanks again, EA_Kalina. As always I learned something. 

The 1,2,3, backup system, wow, that pretty much means never losing anything due to software or hardware failure. I do back up everything, but will add a different method to my current method. No.2 will be setup.  As a direct result of this months newsletter. Good stuff.

I don't trust the cloud for sensitive things, but that's my nervous subjectivity.

Remember that certain A.I. software suites (subscription/paid) have access to cloud saves the same way as they do to local files. Not relevant to regular Google searches. But already some people have lost, or revealed sensitive things like even bank log ons.

This is done by clever manipulation with words, over several A.I. sessions. This allows the attacker to put it all together and get access. It doesn't require programming skills. It requires knowledge of how differerent A.I. services work, and skill full wording.

It all sounds frightening, but there are mitigations. The thing is knowledge. 

I don't use any particular A.I. or anything beyond game saves for cloud so it would be silly for me to go into any detail. Just passing on what I recently found on a famous tech site. (Two in fact). 

My point is if usinging these services, with knowledge their is no need to worry, but the amount of criminal hackers is simply stunning. Some of them are very sophisticated in their method and are professional. It's getting hard for security experts to keep up. M.S. doesn't seem to put much focus on security  with windows 11, we, all of us need to know what the current status of all these things are re: security.

That's why these news letters are great. They provide very useful, and interesting info. In addition they spark discussions about the monthly topic so as a community we share important security info, and can research further if needed.

Thanks again for this months security letter. Very important topic, indeed. Timely too!!