The barrage of articles and blogs that cropped up following the personal identity hack on Wired’s Mat Honan got me thinking about the importance of security in the cloud. In my experience, what happened to Mat is not a unique issue. In fact, it’s actually a somewhat typical downside to – what I call – consumer cloud services. It was, no doubt, a horrible thing to have happen. But outside of the hack itself, I was troubled by how many articles generalized the Amazon and Apple consumer service weaknesses as blanket weaknesses for the cloud as a whole. At best that’s disingenuous. Enterprise and consumer cloud services cannot be conflated. That said, it would be a mistake to ignore how the lessons learned from particular enterprise and consumer cloud service vulnerabilities can inform one another. Especially when these vulnerabilities are exposed through social engineering attacks, which can be.