Wow. There is so much misinformation in this thread. I'll just list a few things.
- The Cloud and The Internet of Things are different things.
- Often, when people talk about wanting to build a cloud, they're actually talking about wanting to build a high-availability cluster of application servers in order to be able to do software patches on a product without bringing a server. This is how OpenVMS works at an operating system level, and this is how almost all Microsoft services and applications work at an application level. (Microsoft Distributed File System, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server replication, etc.) In fact, most really good applications do this.
- The thing about "the cloud" that gets those providers attacked is that they're a high value target, not because they're using a "cloud" (clustered) methodology, but because they're a service provider. Their systems are vulnerable to the same kinds of things that, well, all systems are vulnerable to.
- The special case is that some kinds of Cloud services are not only clustered application servers, but they're hosting a custom or proprietary application. (let's use Dropbox as an example here.) Dropbox is just an application, a piece of code, and is subject to human errors. Dropbox is actually really good at fixing and fessing up to their errors. I'm sure you all remember when there was an error that let somebody who had the exact same file as you know that that file was also in your account.
- Virtualizatoin adds another layer of possible intrusion, and so does out-of-band remote management hardware. You should probably switch away from server computers to home desktops in order to prevent any possible security issues.
I'm going to skip some of the more obvious conspiracy theories, but this all goes to show why it's important to be security-aware. You don't have to be a security professional to follow best practices on your systems and make good judgement calls about where you put your information.
I personally like cloud services a lot, and before I stood up my own SharePoint and Exchange servers at home, I was a happy user of a lot of cloud services. I still recommend them to a lot of people, because they're easy to use and most people weren't ever going to , say, spend any money, time, or effort doing things like making backups of their home computers, just as an example of the kind of thing these services can be used for.
Fortunately, I think that it's going to remain fairly uncommon for the most exotic of problems, such as air-gap networking and rewritten firmware, to be a thing that most people have to worry about. This is especially true given that the original poster linked to an article from three years ago.
In much the same way that when you drive around in a car you just kind of have to suspend your anxiety about the fact that you're driving in a very heavy death box, there are some security vulnerabilities that make it worth examining just how tightly your tin-foil hat is.
If you're not worried about pushdo/cutwail or poisoned DNS servers, but you
are worried about air gap networks and rewritten firmware on your local peripherals, then I would be legitimately interested in hearing why.
