Search and seizure: Why everyone must fear hackers in the cloud

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Expect this headline very soon: "Public cloud used to hack government systems." I’m sure aspects of this are happening right now, and I’m sure we will see more widespread use of public clouds as the platforms for hackery. What should we do with the public clouds used as hacking venues? Do we seize the physical servers? Shut down the offending data center? All of the above?

And if criminals use the same cloud infrastructure as enterprises, how do enterprises know that their data won’t get seized along with the bad guys’ data? Recent developments are not reassuring. Last month, the FBI seized a private cloud server. And we still remember the NSA’s digital spying revelations. Ironically, technical issues may make seizures of public cloud servers unappealing to policing agencies…

Executing law enforcement searches on public clouds presents two problems, according to the FBI: "First, little, if any, data pertaining to a computer user is found in a single geographic location. Second, and more important, even when the data is recovered, it may not be convertible to a format that’s understandable by human readers."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3004444/cloud-computing/search-seizure-why-everyone-must-fear-hackers-in-the-cloud.html