So an interesting thing happened to me recently, and it resulted in a bunch of snarky e-mails from my friends. Apparently, my Google account was hacked or, more likely, Google was hacked. I'm sure it was the latter, because Google and its services must be the biggest target since the golden age of targeting Microsoft.

It began with my Gmail account, which I never use except as an emergency system. I probably log into it once a month. But, because Google wants to make its own life easier, it forced me to use my Gmail account for everything I do with Google. Instead of having separate passwords for Google Voice, AdSense, and even Web surfing, Google stupidly made me consolidate all my passwords into the Google Mail password. It's the new rule.

Why? Is this because Google hasn't got enough computing power to keep track of multiple passwords? Or is it because it wants to make life easier for itself and track everything I do, so it can do a better job of analyzing me for advertising delivery? Hmmm, let me think.

Meanwhile, to hell with security.

This, by the way, tells me that Google does not give a crap about security. So, all of a sudden, a slew of people begin to get spam from my Gmail account, and it's pretty well done. I figure it was an inside job at Google or by some pros. The e-mails are addressed from me, but they don't show up in my outbox.. The spam was sent to those in my contact list; the list that was imported by Google somehow and contains people I've mailed at one time or another.

Anyway, the possibilities as to how this was done are limitless. A browser hack, inside job, key-log trojan, who knows? The spam was from some company that linked to some bogus gift card. Luckily, all the people on my contact list knew the e-mail was not from me because it was too cheery, among other reasons. If you ever get a cheery message from me, call the police!

Google, which has no real customer service that I know of, indicates no way of reporting such a scam except on some blog-like forum, so I changed my password to see if the problem would go away. It did, or so I thought.

Then a couple of days ago, the same kind of thing happened with my Google Voice account. Some guy called me complaining about how I had been calling him all day. There was no evidence of this on my phone, and I wasn't carrying the phone on me, so butt-dialing seemed unlikely. I figured it was a test hack of Google Voice. Again, I see no easy mechanism for reporting anything like this to an actual person at Google.

It's like Google thinks: So what if you send out a little spam, or you're calling people for no apparent reason? What's the worse that can happen? Just live with it, chump.

So what's my point? The point is that this is not about Google (well, not completely). It's about the cloud. While the consolidated password forced by Google is a bad enough idea, the fact that the cloud itself is a security nightmare is often overlooked.

The cloud vendors go on and on about how the cloud is more, not less secure. I've only encountered security problems when the cloud was involved. Millions of credit cards are stolen right off "secure" cloud websites every year. I do not see this changing.

And think about this: Everything in this industry consolidates, at one time or another, to just a very few players in any given sector, which means the cloud vendors will probably do the same. All you'll have are about three players. That means the efforts of hackers will be more targeted and more likely to succeed. Insofar as massive data breaches are concerned, we ain't seen nothing yet.