Security, Privacy, and Digital Forensics in the Cloud

6Hacking and Countermeasures in the Cloud

Farzaneh Abazari¹, Hassan Takabi², and Morteza Analoui¹

¹School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

²Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

6.1 Introduction

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in cloud computing. However, cloud providers and their customers have several security concerns about their assets. Security reports show that risks in the Cloud have increased dramatically, and the Cloud has become a major target for criminals. Recent evidence confirms the possibility of attacks such as data breaches, distributed denial of service (DDoS), man in the middle, and malware injection in the cloud environment. In addition, abuse of cloud resources by attackers is one of the top threats to the cloud environment.

Virtualization is a key technology in cloud computing that enables dynamic allocation of resources to cloud users. However, this technology introduces new threats to the cloud infrastructure. In addition to the virtualization threat, general features of cloud computing, such as multitenancy and using shared resources, enable attackers to penetrate the cloud infrastructure. Because users are managing their business, computation, and storage in the Cloud, they are concerned with the level of security the cloud infrastructure can provide. The purpose of this chapter is to provide perspective on current threats to the ...