582794 external_news 1476888723 1476888723 <![CDATA[“Lurking malice” found in cloud hosting services]]> A study of twenty major cloud hosting services has found that as many as 10 percent of the repositories hosted by them had been compromised — with several hundred of the “buckets” actively providing malware. Such bad content could be challenging to find, however, because it can be rapidly assembled from stored components that individually may not appear to be malicious.

To identify the bad content, researchers created a scanning tool that looks for features unique to the bad repositories, known as “Bars.” The features included certain types of redirection schemes and “gatekeeper” elements designed to protect the malware from scanners. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of California Santa Barbara conducted the study.

Georgia Tech says that the research, believed to be the first systematic study of cloud-based malicious activity, will be presented 24 October at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Vienna, Austria. The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and involves ECE Professor Raheem Beyah and his Ph.D. student Xiaojing Liao.

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