Knowing the Topic at Hand - Phase Three

Rena, M. P. (2011, Hacking the cloud. Popular Science, 278, 68-71. Retrieved from

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The first article, entitled "Hacking the Cloud," talked about how cloud systems were highly susceptible to hacking via malicious code, or malware, and what the hackers could do with infected cloud networks.  Usually what hackers do to launch cyber attacks is to create an improvised network via infecting some websites with malicious code so they can install "backdoors" (basically invisible remote access) to visitors' computers.  With cloud computing this becomes much easier, to gain what are known as "botnets" (the improvised networks) via the cloud.  The cloud can host what are know as virtual machines, computer systems set up like any other desktop yet it is accessed via a remote web server managed by some company.  Users sign up for a monthly price and then have access to their VM.  Hackers can easily sign-up for one of these VM accounts, create malware, and spread it among the entire cloud system giving complete control to the hackers without anyone even detecting them.

Clarifying the casefor cloud computing. (2010). Communications Today, Retrieved from

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The second article, entitled "Clarifying the Case for Cloud Computing," discussed how cloud computing was safe, efficient, but not for everyone.  Cloud computing is a very stable and reliable way to store data.  It explained how the top threat to cloud computing was actually data loss and leakage, and if one was looking to convert IT services to a cloud that they should consider their provider heavily so this would not happen.

I chose these two articles to use mainly because it was hard to find differing views on the threat to clouds, but I found the first article to be very informative and interesting.  In the first article, I like the examples given in the text about the hackers at this DefCon hacking convention would do to clouds.  For instance, "Take Amazon's EC2 cloud, the biggest pay-as-you-use cloud.  NASA uses it to analyze mission data.  Netflix uses it to stream movies.  The DefCon hackers...used it to crash third-party websites." For the second article, I found the fact that the article said nothing about the risk of hacking when searching for a cloud provider if one would want to switch astounding.  And then even to say that the highest securtiy risk of clouds it actually data loss.

The first article helped me understand my topic a lot.  I learned what exactly a cloud can do, which is actually more than I had thought before.  I also learned what hackers can do with the clouds and what kind of attacks they do like the DDOS, which stands for distributed denial of service.  Basically, it's when a hacker's botnet will bombard a website with bogus internet traffic possibly causing the website's server to crash.  But with a cloud they can just as easily sign up for an account, create some VM's, and use them to send out malware, or do a DDOS attack.  Then just as easily shut the VM's down so as to leave no trace of any malicious activity.  Hopefully I learn next how cloud security can be improved to stop such infiltration.  It seems though the hackers are already winning this war.  Until next time.

- Derek S.