'Lurking Malice' Study Finds Malware Hiding In The Cloud (gatech.edu)

"Cloud repositories have become the hub of malicious web activities," warns one computer engineering professor. An anonymous reader quotes SC magazine: A recent study detected more than 600 cloud repositories hosting malware and other malicious activities on major cloud platforms including Amazon, Google, Groupon and thousands of other sites. Researchers...scanned more than 140,000 sites on 20 major cloud hosting services and found that as many as 10 percent of the repositories hosted by them had been compromised, according to the "Lurking Malice in the Cloud: Understanding and Detecting Cloud Repository as a Malicious Service" report [PDF]...

[According to the researchers] threat actors are taking advantage of the cloud because of how difficult it can be to scan the large amount of storage they provide... service providers which are bound by privacy commitments and ethical concerns tend to avoid inspecting their customer's repositories without proper consent and even when they are willing to inspect them it is difficult to spot malicious content.

Comments

Why do we care?

[Cigaes]

Malware is a problem when people try to execute it. Malware laying in “cloud repositories” (what does that even mean?) is doing no harm except waste place. Why waste even more energy trying to scan it? Or even study it?

In other news...

[mykepredko]

Water is wet.

If you want to keep data secure, keep it in house and hire people who know how to protect it.

Re:The cloud is a joke

[roc97007]

Because, it's a fad. Like outsourcing. The people making the decisions typically aren't technologists, and tend to believe the marketing hype.