Can the Cloud Survive a DOS Attack?
A security guru from Adobe has a dire warning about the cloud: According to Bryan Sullivan, hackers may, in the future, launch massive denial of service (DOS) attacks against the cloud, tying up resources and making cloud apps more expensive.
The cloud is designed to be resilient. When a single server suffers a DOS attack, it is brought to its knees. In the cloud, however, workloads can be shifted to another server. Therefore, these DOS attacks don't cripple the cloud -- they simply make the cloud provider use more resources.
According to Sullivan, these attacks are purely economic in nature.
It is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure DOS attacks will be widespread enough to change the economics of cloud computing.
Do you trust the cloud? Answer me that at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/24/2011 at 1:18 PM