Friday 7 February 2014

Amazon Is Not Good All The Time!

Most Malware Found on Amazon

Security firm’s report revealed that Amazon online services are the biggest malware servers across the globe, followed by GoDaddy and Google. The reason is that malware producers take advantage of the cloud. The report claims that hackers are using cloud hosting platforms in order to quickly and effectively serve malware to oblivious users. This allows them to bypass detection and geographic blacklisting by serving from a trusted provider like Amazon.

Security experts found out that the intruders compromised legitimate websites for nefarious purposes, along with buying and hosting their own websites. Today’s ease of website creation, low cost and speed of deployment allows to infect millions of machines and lots of enterprise systems. Of course, cloud providers, including Amazon, GoDaddy and Google, have security policies against malicious activity and do their best to take down offenders once they are discovered. The problem is that a huge number of sites hosted on their cloud systems all make that discovery job difficult, while the malware producers are trying to seek safety in numbers. Security experts admitted that it’s still up to providers to do something to stop the proliferation of malware and hold responsibility for monitoring the activities on their properties.

Information from the report also demonstrated that in the last quarter of 2013, the United States was the most active malware hosting nation, accounting for 44% of the worldwide share of malware. This is 5 times more than Germany, which accounted for 9% of the global malware and followed the US in the list. As for the online services, Amazon appeared the top malware-hosting provider (16% of the global share), followed by GoDaddy (14% share).

Some may remember that a few months ago a Google-backed BitTorrent client was caught spreading malware to Windows PCs and Android users.

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