Where exactly is your information?

Jeremiah Grossman of White Hat Security has a good post about the rise in popularity of web based services and the dangers associated with putting so much information on other peoples servers. You can check it out here.

What strikes me about this is that we are so willing to put information in places that we have no control over. We assume that because the site has an SSL certificate and a name that sounds good we will give them more than enough information to become us. We also willingly give them enough information to rob us blind and put us into serious debt. Now I'm not suggesting that most of these sites are malicious or that your data is really in danger, but we really need to be more cautious who we give our information to and where we put it. All servers, all sites and all companies are vulnerable to attack. Even the big names that we all trust have problems and issues that are beyond our control.