You shouldn’t use the Google Authenticator cloud backup

This is in addition to my google authenticator backup guide a couple days ago:

https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/15tnw2z/google_authenticator_does_not_sync_with_your/

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Some of you pointed out, that there are other authenticators like authy or the microsoft authenticator. These are indeed great alternatives. But what ringed my alarm bells, were the people commenting, that they are using the google drive backup feature.

As an IT-systemadministrator (that's what my profession is called in germany), I want to warn you about using this feature, because you put your authenticator codes in danger with this. Following this introduction, i will give you the 2 most relevant points of possible dangers.

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1. The codes of your authenticator will be stored on cloud servers and therefore can be extracted, if your google drive passwort get hacked or if you get scammed with an malicious e-mail. When you are using the offline backup, this is one less danger you have to fear. And anyone in crypto space knows that scams, hacks and malwares really likes to target crypto users.
2. When the codes get uploaded to your google drive cloud, the traffic is not end-to-end encrypted. This means your codes get send unencrypted to your cloud. Therefore they are complety visible to a hacker, who intercepts your network traffic. This wouldn't be such a problem, if end-to-end encryption would be implemented to protect your traffic.

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According to BleepingComputer, the end-to-end encryption could possibly be added by google in the future. Until this happens, i wouldn't recommend storing your authenticator codes in your google drive cloud. But even then, the point i made in number 1 is still valid and can put you in great danger of losing your codes in case of a hack, scam or malware attack. (if your google drive password can get extracted)