Hackers find a home in Amazon's EC2 cloud Posted by l33tdawg on Friday, December 11, 2009 - 12:00 AM (Reads: 211) Source: Computer World Security researchers have spotted the Zeus botnet running an unauthorized command and control center on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. This marks the first time Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity, according to Don DeBolt, director of threat research with HCL Technologies, a contractor that does security research for CA. The hackers didn't do this with Amazon's permission, however. They got onto Amazon's infrastructure by first hacking into a Web site that was hosted on Amazon's servers and then secretly installing their command and control infrastructure. DeBolt declined to say whose Web site was hacked to get onto Amazon's cloud, but the Zeus software has now been removed, he said. Zeus is a password-stealing botnet. Variants of this malware have been linked to more than US$100 million in bank fraud in the past year.