Last week the News of the World came under fire for allegedly hacking the voicemail of public figures in a bit to snare stories. This week Twitter’s business plans are circulating the blogosphere after a hacker cracked the Google Document account of an administrator at Twitter.

Both stories raise the issue of ethics and whether it’s appropriate to publish a news stories based on information sourced by dubious means. But as Broadstuff’s Alan Patrick spotted there’s another issue in play that threatens confidence in businesses services delivered via the internet.

If you store your data in The Cloud, you are far more at risk from these sort of occurrences. Especially if it’s free, as we have noted before the only Service Level at zero cost is zero service, and that if you ain’t paying, you ain’t the customer.”

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has advice for advocates of cloud based computing on his blog.

Companies promoting cloud computing – from Google to Amazon to Microsoft – are all confident that their systems just cannot be hacked. But if you allow your employees […] to send confidential information on cloud-based e-mail then you’d better make sure their passwords are super secure.

Tighten your passwords and pin codes. You have been warned.