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Attackers Install DDoS Bots On Amazon Cloud

Posted by timothy on from the fully-buzzword-compliant dept.

itwbennett (1594911) writes "Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in distributed search engine software Elasticsearch to install DDoS malware on Amazon and possibly other cloud servers. Last week security researchers from Kaspersky Lab found new variants of Mayday, a Trojan program for Linux that's used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The malware supports several DDoS techniques, including DNS amplification. One of the new Mayday variants was found running on compromised Amazon EC2 server instances, but this is not the only platform being misused, said Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner Friday in a blog post."

4 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Only a problem for unpatched systems? by timrod · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The article claims that only 1.1.x versions of Elasticsearch were vulnerable, and that the vulnerabilities were fixed in 1.2.x and 1.3.x. To me, this sounds like any company still running 1.1.x versions brought it upon themselves.

  2. But it's the cloud... by houstonbofh · · Score: 4, Funny

    But it's the cloud! I don't have to worry about things like software updates and patching!

    The more things change...

    1. Re:But it's the cloud... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If you choose a cloud offering which does that for you then yes, you don't have to worry about things like software updates and patching.

      However, if you choose a cloud offering which is essentially a hosted server, then you still have to worry about all the things you would with your own local server, excluding power and hardware faults.

      Amazon AWS is a platform provider, its not a fully managed solution and never has been - people have been caught out by that before when availability zones failed and suddenly people realised the benefit of having redundant instances in multiple availability zones.

  3. Stupid sensationalism by Imagix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So why is Amazon being specifically mentioned here? What makes this specific to Amazon? Is Google Compute Engine somehow immune to this? Or Azure, or any other hosting provider? Or self-hosted? Better headline: "Servers compromised through known vulnerability, admins failed to update software to close vulnerability."