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"Obviously, with all your data being available into the cloud, in one place, available 24/7 through a fast Internet link, this will be a goldmine for cyberciminals," Raiu said. "All that is necessary here is to get a hold of the authentication token required to access the cloud account; this is actually already happening with malware that has become 'steal everything' in the past years. Although the end points are now more secure, the situation is that the data is in a more risky place, and it will be much easier to silently steal it."
Raiu said that current attacks focus on infecting a user's machine with malware that silently logs keystrokes or lifts information stored on the system. However, with an OS that utilizes the cloud, hackers have only to figure out a user's credentials to access a myriad of personally identifying and financial data.
"Who needs to steal banking accounts, when you have Google Checkout? Or, who needs to monitor passwords, when they're all nicely stored into the Google Dashboard?" he said.
Meanwhile, at least one security solution provider says that in light of the recent Amazon and Sony breaches, it's only a matter of time before Google's cloud-based Chromebooks are hacked or otherwise leak users' private information.
Roy Miehe, CEO of Campbell, Calif.-based AAAntivirus, said that Google's other applications have either been hacked or compromised users' information because the company in general falls short at building in security redundancy in its platforms, which has previously led to Android and Gmail breaches ultimately sets the stage for future data loss.
"Everything that Google touches and/or does has a single point of failure," Miehe said. "They're controlling so much that if their servers go down like the rest of their products do, what do their users do? Isn't that a single point of failure?"
While Miehe applauded Google's attempts to provide Microsoft with competition on the OS front, he said that Google probably wasn't the best player to do that based on their history of large-scale data breaches.
"They're spreading themselves into this one here is going to be detrimental to the public. Not necessarily bad, but they don't have redundancy," he said. "With that many engineers, how do you monitor who's going to release code and who's not?"
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