Is YOUR data safe in the cloud? Researchers reveal the 'lurking malice' in major services and say 10% have been compromised by hackers

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Summaries

Summary Sentence:

In the study, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of California Santa Barbara created a scanning tool called ‘BarFinder’ to track down the unique features of bad repositories.

Full Summary:

Hundreds of repositories across nearly two dozen major cloud services are actively providing malware, including phishing, ‘drive-by downloads,’ and fake sites, according to a new study.

In the study, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of California Santa Barbara created a scanning tool called ‘BarFinder’ to track down the unique features of bad repositories. ECE Professor Raheem Beyah and his Ph.D. student Xiaojing Liao are on this research team.

Hundreds of repositories across nearly two dozen major cloud services are actively providing malware, including phishing, ‘drive-by downloads,’ and fake sites, according to a new study.

The list includes domains from Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, and according to the team, the malicious content can be difficult to spot.

Researchers say hackers could hide components of malware in separate locations in the cloud, allowing them to go untracked as individual items – but, these seemingly innocent pieces can quickly be assembled to launch an attack.

In the study, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of California Santa Barbara created a scanning tool called ‘BarFinder’ to track down the unique features of bad repositories. 

The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and involves ECE Professor Raheem Beyah and his Ph.D. student Xiaojing Liao.

Read the entire article at The Daily Mail.

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School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

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Keywords
Raheem Beyah, Georgia Tech, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, cloud malware, Cyber Attack
Status
  • Created By: Jackie Nemeth
  • Workflow Status: Published
  • Created On: Oct 21, 2016 - 3:07pm
  • Last Updated: Oct 21, 2016 - 3:17pm