Amazon Servers Used In Sony Playstation Hack

the simurgh writes "Amazon servers may have been used to carry out the massive Playstation hack that compromised the personal information of more than 100 million Playstation Network users. According to a report from Bloomberg, sources close to the ongoing investigation say the attack was mounted from Amazon Web Service's cloud computing platform."

Re:A cloud attacks another

[somersault]

You mean it actually had a meaning before?

Re:really?

[Hardhead_7]

Considering how Amazon has become known for caving to the slightest pressure from law enforcement or even just a nosy senator [talkingpointsmemo.com], to host such an attack from EC2 seems extraordinarily stupid.

It would make much more sense to launch it from somewhere hosted by a company that doesn't have a reputation for giving up their customer's data and shutting down even legitimate stuff that happens to run afoul of their vague guidelines.

Nah, once you do something on the scale of the PSN hack, it doesn't matter if the service provider caves too easily or not, because everyone gives up information when they get served a warrant. And there will be warrants. They just had to make sure Amazon has no way to trace it back to them, and it seems very unlikely the perpetrators accessed Amazon's servers from anything other than a laptop bought at a yard sale with a fake MAC address on a public wi-fi hotspot.

And the cloud services were paid for with a Visa gift card that was bought with cash.

Re:I don't see it...

[Anonymous Coward]

They cannot legally monitor for abuse... Or they can then get sued for "not finding abuse fast enough" and shit like that.

It is the same reason why no shared or VPS hosting company says they actively monitor your usage / files. This is a form of liability control for them. The second they start taking responsibility for "catching pirates, hackers, crackers, and pedophiles" is the second they can then be named in a lawsuit and sued.

Re:I don't see it...

[datapharmer]

Seriously. I've grown tired of reporting abuse to amazon, whose policy is to "send the complaint on to the customer". I now just block their IP ranges. Unfortunate for anyone who legitimately wants to crawl my sites using their service, but if enough people block them they will start seeing customers head elsewhere. Blocking about a half dozen abusive ISPs has cut my attack logs down exponentially, so failure to regulate your service = banned appears to be an acceptable policy in many cases.