December 10, 2009
Hackers find a home in Amazon's EC2 cloud
Security researchers discover the Zeus password-stealing botnet running on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing servers
By Robert McMillan
Security researchers have spotted the Zeus botnet running an unauthorized command and control center on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing infrastructure.
This marks the first time Amazon Web Services'
cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity,
according to Don DeBolt, director of threat research with HCL
Technologies, a contractor that does security research for CA. The
hackers didn't do this with Amazon's permission, however. They got onto
Amazon's infrastructure by first hacking into a Web site that was
hosted on Amazon's servers and then secretly installing their command
and control infrastructure.
DeBolt
declined to say whose Web site was hacked to get onto Amazon's cloud,
but the Zeus software has now been removed, he said. Zeus is a
password-stealing botnet. Variants of this malware have been linked to
more than $100 million in bank fraud in the past year.
He thinks
the hackers may have just stumbled on a Web site with a security
vulnerability -- they may have hacked the site's software or simply
stolen an administrative password from a desktop computer to get on the
site. "I think it's more a target of opportunity than a target of
choice," he said.
In the past few years, law enforcement
takedowns and bad publicity have made it harder for many criminals to
host their back-end infrastructure in legitimate or even
semi-legitimate datacenters, so they have moved to Web-based services.
Although this didn't happen in this case, law enforcement officials
worry that criminals might start using stolen credit cards to purchase
cloud-based computing services from companies such as Amazon.
In
August, security vendor Arbor Networks spotted a botnet that used
Twitter to issue commands to hacked computers. Security experts say
that criminals will probably seek out new Web services to use in 2010.