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Malware in the Cloud: What You Need to Know

Cloud security is not as simple as it may seem. Businesses have a shared security responsibility with cloud service providers, but some lack the knowledge to keep up their share of the bargain. Poor configuration and data leaks are common problems that many businesses encounter in the cloud. These issues can lead to malware infecting your cloud computing environment.

Here are a few of the different types of malware that can disrupt your cloud services.

DDoS Attacks

Botnets are becoming more and more common, with malware-as-a-service being offered by more malicious actors at an increasingly cheap price. Self-service cloud offerings allow these attackers to easily gain access and notoriety by launching large-scale DDoS attacks, which have been measured at speeds of up to 30 Gbps. Since cloud computing hosts multiple customers in a single cloud, these attacks can affect your cloud environment, as well.

Hypercall Attacks

An attacker uses a Virtual Machine (VM) to intrude the victim’s VM by exploiting the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) hypercall handler. This gives the attacker the ability to access VMM privileges and possibly even execute malicious code.

Hypervisor DoS

This attack uses a high percentage of your hypervisor’s resources in order to leverage flaws in design or setup. Researchers found that this malware accounted for 70 percent of malware attacks targeting cloud providers’ hypervisor, which manages customers’ virtual environments. One study found that 71.2 percent of all Xen and 65.8 percent of all KVM vulnerabilities could be exploited by a guest VM. For the sake of context, AWS uses Xen for its hypervisor, and Google uses a proprietary version of KVM.

Co-Location

An attacker tries to find the target VM’s host in order to place their own VM on the same host. This is used to gain leverage in cross-VM side-channel attacks, such (Read more...)