Amazon Responds to Zeus Botnet C&C Incident
Dec 18, 2009 Security News
Lori McVittie at DevCentral writes about a conversation she had with an Amzon EC2 representative concerning the botnet command and control running in EC2:
An e-mail exchange with Kay Kinton, a spokesperson for Amazon, on the subject of Amazon and its recent run-in with the Zeus botnet controller, raised two very interesting and valid points. First, there is a fine balance that must be maintained by providers – cloud or traditional hosting – regarding the privacy of applications and data deployed by customers and monitoring/security. Second, Kay points out that it’s easier in the EC2 environment, at least, to disable botnets once they are discovered.
The second point is one that appears on the surface to be true but I’m not entirely convinced. A cloud provider has complete control over its environment (even if you don’t, making this somewhat of a double-edged sword) and thus they can act immediately to terminate the offending application. True. But in any environment in which you have physical or management network access to an offending application/system it should be easy to terminate an offending application. Perhaps more important about this point is that a cloud computing provider can prevent the launch of another offending application, but again – I’m not sure it’s any easier or more difficult in a cloud computing environment than it would be in a traditional hosting or data center environment.
Now the first point is a bit more subtle and definitely deserves some attention as it potentially pits one customer’s privacy against one (or more) other customers’ security and raises some interesting questions regarding how deeply in the sand such a line should be drawn in a cloud computing environment.
The entire article is here
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