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Amazon's EC2 Having Problems With Spam and Malware
jamie pointed out a story about the recent problems Amazon's EC2 service has been having with malware and spam. "EC2 space is now actively blocked by Outblaze, and has been listed by Spamhaus in their PBL list [...] However as Seth Breidbart noted in the comments, 'note that Amazon will terminate the instance. That means that the spammer just creates another instance, which gets a new IP address, and continues spamming.' True enough -- as described, instance termination simply isn't good enough."
My thoughts exactly. Luckily, Brian Krebs at the Washington Post wrote about this in his Security Fix blog.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Actually, tough luck to vendor who allowed the fraudulent transaction. The credit card companies themselves typically have very little (any?) responsibilities when it comes to fraudulent transactions. It's entirely up to the vendor to do the proper verification prior to billing a transaction, as far as I know.
The problem is that these small fraudulent transactions are typically more expensive to track down than they are to write off. If someone racks up a $1,000 bill on the ec2 cloud with a stolen card, the credit card company isn't out a dime, and the vendor (in this case Amazon) isn't likely to spend much time finding and prosecuting whoever is using the stolen card because it's expensive and time consuming to do so. Sure, maybe some ip addresses will be blocked and cards added to blacklists (temporarily?) but that doesn't stop the next guy from doing the same with a new stolen card.