Attackers Install DDoS Bots On Amazon Cloud

itwbennett (1594911) writes "Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in distributed search engine software Elasticsearch to install DDoS malware on Amazon and possibly other cloud servers. Last week security researchers from Kaspersky Lab found new variants of Mayday, a Trojan program for Linux that's used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The malware supports several DDoS techniques, including DNS amplification. One of the new Mayday variants was found running on compromised Amazon EC2 server instances, but this is not the only platform being misused, said Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner Friday in a blog post."

Is the AWS cloud...

[digsbo]

Is the AWS cloud so powerful that it can create a DDOS botnet that it cannot withstand?

But it's the cloud...

[houstonbofh]

But it's the cloud! I don't have to worry about things like software updates and patching!

The more things change...

Re:Oh, Look! A red herring!

[i kan reed]

Look, slashdotters are terrified of change. If you don't like that, go somewhere else.

Except that's changing things, so please don't; it's too scary.

Re:But it's the cloud...

[DivineKnight]

Quiet you. A few more revolutions around this sun, and we'll own this planet. We've all but convinced them that they need to move everything onto the cloud, and soon thereafter that they need to upgrade to this year's CPU: ARM (preferably v6). Those of us who are quietly stashing those gigantic x86 16-core / 4 CPU beasts that companies are throwing away because 'IT & programming are last year's business' are sitting pretty for the upset that is to come...I mean, we are looking at a "Napolean won Waterloo" level of misreporting style event, and it feels good.