Whitepaper on cloud server risks - MIM Central

Copyright © 2011, CloudPassage Inc. 1 Overview ....................................................................................2 Cloud Servers Attract e-Criminals ..........................................2 Servers Have More Exposure in the Cloud ............................3 Cloud Elasticity Multiplies Attackable Surface Area .............3 The Boomerang Problem .........................................................4 Managing New Cloud Risks ....................................................4 About CloudPassage................................................................5 Cloud Servers: New Risk Considerations whitepapeR Copyright © 2011, CloudPassage Inc. 2 Overview The tremendous scalability, flexibility, and speed of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) make it one of the fastest-growing sectors of the cloud computing markets. IaaS providers combine virtualization technologies with massive infrastructure to deliver bandwidth, storage, and CPU power on-demand and with granular control over scale and costs. The potential benefits of hosting applications and workloads on cloud servers are enormous, making cloud servers the de facto norm for a rapidly

growing set of use cases. Security and compliance, however, remain major challenges to adoption of public cloud infrastructure services. Usage agreements and documentation squarely make the user of IaaS, not the provider, responsible for protecting servers, applications and data in the cloud – essentially everything from the virtual machine OS upward in the stack. 1 It is critical for organizations to understand the issues around securing IaaS environments as they move toward the flexibility, scale, and power of cloud hosting. The first step to understanding the issues is awareness of new exposures, threats, and risks. This white paper from CloudPassage presents specific details on the most pertinent new risks associated with adoption of cloud IaaS. It is based on real world learning, shared by companies we have worked with, to achieve security and compliance in the cloud. Software companies moving to SaaS business models, growing social media startups and long-established industry bellwethers have contributed to this knowledge. Cloud Servers Attract e-Criminals Online fraud has grown into a sophisticated underground economy that requires infrastructure on a massive scale. Phishing, password cracking, and denial of service attacks leverage botnets – illicit networks built from huge numbers of compromised servers and personal computers. Botnets consist of thousands of “zombies” – personal computers infected by malware – which carry out commands on behalf of the botnet operator. These compromised computers can bombard web servers with denial-of-service attacks, fire thousands of password attempts per hour, and participate in dozens of other online cracking activities. Fraudsters and e-criminals use command-and-control software to coordinate zombie attack execution. Command-and-control most frequently operates from compromised servers, without the server owner’s knowledge. Fraudsters demand a constant stream of freshly compromised servers to keep botnets running. An entire underground business known as bot herding 2 emerged to capitalize on this illicit need. Bot-herders make their living by building botnets to then sell or rent to other e-criminals. This practice has evolved to the point of Fraud-as-a-Service, the sale of prebuilt botnets ondemand, for a few hundred dollars a month. 3 It takes bot herders’ time and resources to seek out and compromise vulner- able servers. Economies of scale and cost-benefit apply to a bot herding business just as any other. 1 For example, Amazon Web Services refers to this as the “shared responsibility model” in the AWS Overview of Security Processes. 2 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bot_herder 3 The term “Fraud-as-a-Service” is attributed to...

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