Robin Hood Gone Evil: Loophole Leading To Cloud Pickpocketing Identified Researchers at North Carolina State university and University of Oregon have proposed a jaw-dropping price tag for performing heavy duty cloud computing task – as low as zero dollars. Experiments reveal that cloud-based web browsers can be exploited to hijack the underlying computational power, and that as well, in total anonymity. The result could be as unforgivable as cloud computing time theft of mammoth proportions. The pickpocketed resources, once fallen into the wrong hands, can be used for just about anything, including brute force password crack attempts, denial of service attacks and other genres
Denial-of-service attacks
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection Security is still cited as a main reason by your large, stodgy corporations for staying clear of cloud computing. And while the cloud does have its security challenges, there is one key security benefit that cloud computing offers — Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) protection. After all, you can try to block, engineer and reroute traffic (difficult) or you can just throw more infrastructure at your attackers (easy) until they get tired of pumping traffic at your web servers. Amazon themselves exemplified this benefit by scaling up infrastructure to disrupt a recent DDOS attack
WikiLeaks and the Cloud DDOS Strategy I found the recent WikiLeaks saga to be fascinating. Never in history has the individual had so much power to collate and distribution sensitive information, with the ability to embarrass governments around the world and put them into damage control. But for a cloud computing vendor like myself, this story added an interesting twist. Within hours of releasing documents, the WikiLeaks servers were under heavy attack from patriotic individuals, and likely also governments, trying to stem the flow of information. It was a typical distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, which can usually shut-down an
