security firm Says Amazon is hosting most of the net's malware.

Report says net's large cloud providers, including Google and GoDaddy, are unknowingly harbouring ‘on-demand’ malware

Large cloud service providers like Amazon, GoDaddy and Google are unwittingly serving large volumes of malware as malicious producers latch on to the services. Photograph: Dale O'Dell/Alamy

Amazon web services are the biggest malware server in the world along with GoDaddy and Google, as malware producers take advantage of the cloud, according to a new report.
The report from security firm Solutionary claims that malware writers are using the big cloud hosting platforms to quickly and effectively serve malware to oblivious internet users, allowing them to bypass detection and geographic blacklisting by serving from a trusted provider like Amazon.
“Malware and, more specifically, its distributors are utilising the technologies and services that make processes, application deployment and website creation easier. Now we have to maintain our focus not only on the most dangerous parts of the Web but also on the parts we expect to be more trustworthy," said Rob Kraus, Solutionary's director of research for the security engineering research team.
Solutionary discovered that hackers compromise legitimate sites for nefarious purposes, as well as buying and hosting their own sites.
The report claims malware producers use the cloud hosting services like Amazon and GoDaddy for the same reasons legitimate publishers use them.
The ease of website creation, low cost and speed of deployment allows malware producers to create and remove malware serving websites quickly, easily and cost effectively, allowing them to infect millions of computers and vast numbers of enterprise systems, according to the report.
Cloud providers such as Amazon, GoDaddy and Google all have stringent security policies against this kind of malicious activity, and remove offenders as soon as they are discovered on their systems.
The sheer number of websites and services hosted on their cloud systems, however, make that discovery job very difficult with the malware producers attempting to seeking safety in numbers.
“Ultimately it is still up to providers to take action to stop the proliferation of malware and to be accountable for policing the activities on their properties,” the Solutionary report stated.
Data from Solutionary also showed that in the last three months of 2013, the US was the world’s number one malware hosting nation with 44% of the global share of malware, five times larger than Germany which was responsible for 9% of the malware detected by the company’s security research team and the second leading malware hosting nation.
The report claims Amazon was the top malware-hosting provider with a 16% share, with GoDaddy ranking second with a 14% share.