Cloud Computing: Amazon is a hornet’s nest of malware
January 16, 2014
Grazed from The Washington Post. Author: Editorial Staff.
Amazon’s cloud computing service plays host to some of the most prolific malware distributors on the Internet, security researchers have discovered. Of the 10 sites that pump out malware most frequently, four are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) – including the number one site, download-instantly.com, according to a threat report published Wednesday by the IT security firm Solutionary.
The report comes a week after we learned that hackers allegedly used Amazon’s cloud hosting solution as a platform for a botnet that scraped personal information from potentially millions of LinkedIn subscribers. Cloud computing is becoming an attractive way for online criminals to launch attacks against businesses and consumers because of its low cost. It allows users to instantly set up an array of virtual servers that can be ordered to perform both legitimate and abusive functions…
Together, the four Amazon-hosted sites accounted for 6 percent of all malware Solutionary found in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the report. Amazon (whose chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post) is the leading malware host among global hosting providers, followed closely by GoDaddy…
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