Abuse of the Cloud as an Attack Platform

Abstract

We present an exploratory study of responses from 75 security professionals and ethical hackers in order to understand how they abuse cloud platforms for attack purposes. The participants were recruited at the Black Hat and DEF CON conferences. We presented the participants' with various attack scenarios and asked them to explain the steps they would have carried out for launching the attack in each scenario. Participants' responses were studied to understand attackers' mental models, which would improve our understanding of necessary security controls and recommendations regarding precautionary actions to circumvent the exploitation of clouds for malicious activities. We observed that in 93.78% of the responses, participants are abusing cloud services to establish their attack environment and launch attacks.

Launching Stealth Attacks using Cloud

“…Hosting Phishing Websites on the Cloud: Attackers are now able to host a phishing website on the cloud platform to steal credentials of legitimate users on the Internet [6], [7], [13], [14]. Attackers had developed a phishing website that asked users to enter their Microsoft 365 credentials 5,6 . The website was designed and hosted on a popular website creation and hosting service called http://www.wix.com.…”