It did not take long for the fears of many to come true. Since the launch of cloud services, people have been referring back to the issue of security and whether cloud computing can survive hackers' games. According to the article, one of the cloud based Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud) sites was compromised by hackers as the command and control (C&C) operation site. the hackers used the site to spread the Zeus banking Trojan (a password stealing email scam that aims not to only steal your password but also your financial data). In the following paragraphs, a clearer look at Amazon EC2 cloud based service's issues will take place.
The virus was first discovered when security researchers at CA were running a check up on spam; they then came across one with a URL for a malware called xmas2.exe. After examining the executed file, it became evident that the file contained Zeus Trojan which was hosted by Amazon web services housed by Amazon EC2. Once the virus was discovered, Amazon paused the activity o the files serving the botnet. Amazon representative mentioned that this kind of attacks hurt the reputation of cloud computing, however, it is always possible to have these attacks whether you have cloud computing or not.
Another issue occurred this passed Wednesday was the outage of one of Amazon's data centers. The outage lasted for several hours and made consumers unhappy. Furthermore, the whole backup component of a redundant supply had failed; this caused some of the facility's servers to fail to perform which ultimately means failure to retrieve information and instances needed by both the employees and their customers. In conclusion, I think that these issues are random and they could happen to any other type of infrastructure and not just cloud based services and data centers. Therefore, I think that people should not rush to conclude that cloud computing is totally insecure and is vital to attacks.
