Public cloud used to power supercharged DDoS attacks

Public cloud is increasingly being used by hackers to launch DDoS attacks, with a quarter of criminals using such services to launch malicious attacks between July 2017 and July 2018.

This has increased significantly compared to the previous 12 months when just 18.5 percent of attacked exploited public cloud services, according to research by Link11's Security Operation Center (LSOC). 

Microsoft Azure was the most used platform abused by hackers, with 38.7 percent of attacks originating from there, while AWS was used in 32.7 percent of incidents. Google lagged behind, being used for 10.7 percent of attacks.

"The people behind DDoS attacks are embracing the use of public cloud services for the same reasons as legitimate organisations: the services provide flexible, on-demand capacity and resources, and can be provisioned in just a few minutes," said Aatish Pattni, regional director, UK & Ireland at Link11.

"For threat actors, the benefits are even more compelling because they will often use stolen credit card details and false identities to pay for the services. This makes the perpetrators almost impossible to trace, even though providers such as Amazon are taking strong action against misuse, and asking users to report any suspected abuse of their services."

Link 11 said public cloud proves particularly popular with hackers because of speed. Offering bandwidth of between 1 and 10Gbps, public cloud services provided by the most widely used providers allow criminals to shoot 1000 times as many bots at websites they want to attack compared to using individual devices such as IoT equipment, it added. 

However, Link11 warned that there was little businesses could do to prevent malicious actors from using public cloud implementations to launch attacks as they're commonly using the same platforms for their infrastructure. Instead, the company advises businesses to better analyse communication between their public cloud service and their own network so anomalies can be picked up and dealt with quickly. 

This article originally appeared at itpro.co.uk