Bloomberg: Sony attack gives Amazon a black eye | Hacker News Reader

Bloomberg: Sony attack gives Amazon a black eye

bloomberg.com

3 pointsbconway5 comments

Yeah, let's blame Amazon for renting servers to people who might use them illegally, until they came along there wasn't a choice and everyone hacking into servers illegally had to do it from their own IP addresses at home.

The entire article is kind of silly. In the text their quoted expert says...

“Realistically, Amazon can’t do anything to prevent it,” Malcolm said. “There is no way of telling who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy.”

That kind of invalidates the article. If there's nothing Amazon can do there's not much point talking about it (and if Amazon decided to shut their entire program down tomorrow hackers would just use Rackspace or Azure so even then it wouldn't mean anything)

The whole article seems designed to stir up trouble. Like the heading "FBI Probe" which sounds serious until you read the first few sentences of it...

"FBI Special Agent Darrell Foxworth, a spokesman for the agency’s San Diego office, said he couldn’t comment on whether the bureau served Amazon with a search warrant or subpoena and that investigators are following up “each and every lead.”

So to the best of the author's knowledge there is no FBI Probe. My favorite though was this paragraph near the end...

"The episode will cause individuals and companies to rethink what data to put on the cloud and force companies to potentially double what they spend on application security, said Murray Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University who specializes in computer systems security. In the long run, it will be cheaper than being hacked, he said."

How does someone using Amazon to hack Sony's network make other people reconsider using Amazon? Amazon's security wasn't compromised (and in Sony's case the only info "in their cloud" was account info which has to be stored on Sony's servers by definition).

The reporter's really bending over backwards trying to play the "but what does it mean for cloud computing?!" card even though PSN got breached despite being hosted by Sony on their own servers. Amazon got a black eye because people can create fraudulent EC2 accounts with fake information? And you can't do this with any traditional hosting provider because? And then there is this beautiful gem:

The episode will cause individuals and companies to rethink what data to put on the cloud and force companies to potentially double what they spend on application security, said Murray Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University who specializes in computer systems security.

This is a terrible article. It almost looks like Sony's PR people are trying to come up with strange stories to make it look like lots of people are culpable for Sony's inability to store date safely.

If the attack gives Amazon a black eye, imagine what it does to Turing and his universal computing machine.

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