Solutionary, a leading MSSP (Managed Security Service Provider) owned by NTT, reported in its Q2 – 2014 Threat Intelligence Report, that Amazon hosted 41% of the malware it detected through its SERT honeynet network. The honeynet is a honeypot network of devices spread across various locations around the world that bait and trap malware, in order to analyze it in depth. Attackers like to use Amazon because it’s easy to use, scales-on-demand, and is fairly inexpensive. The debate now centers around the area of responsibility. Should Amazon be held responsible for ensuring its application infrastructure is secure from malware?
One camp says no, and the other camp believes it should bear some responsibility. Looking at it from a customer point of view, I’m part of the 2nd camp. One of the main tenants of selecting cloud compute is security – if I’m going to migrate my corporate business applications to the cloud, security is a must. The last thing any company wants to worry about is knowing there is a small chance that a cloud instance next to mine might belong to Joe “Hacker”. Amazon should beef up its security portfolio, and acquire an APT security company similar to FireEye. Then, deploy the security technology into the AWS infrastructure, so that it can detect and mitigate advanced malware in near real time, offering customers a malware-free cloud compute hosting environment.