Ride the Lightning

Backdoors: The Bane of Cloud Computing

June 5, 2013

To be more accurate, backdoors are the bane of all outsourcing, including cloud computing.

Thanks to Dave Ries, who sent me a SANS newsletter, which harkened back to an Ars Technica article that I had missed, but one which carries an important message. The article tells the story of a former Hostgator employee who was arrested and charged with rooting 2,700 servers.

The employee had installed backdoors on the popular web hosting provider's servers, giving him nearly unfettered control over them. According to prosecutors, he disguised his malware as a widely used Unix administration tool to prevent the discovery of the backdoor process.

Understandably, there are no firm statistics about how many backdoors exist, but the general thinking is that there are a lot more than most people think – even mid-level employees at a hosting company can create backdoors.

If there is any good news here, it is that taking security precautions can help. In this case, a desktop monitoring system that took screenshots of employee workstations in one-minute increments helped Hostgator officials find the alleged culprit quickly.

The mere existence of backdoors is one reason why I am fond of the hybrid cloud solution, where the equipment belongs to the client and is administered and secured by a trusted company rather than the cloud provider.