http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/aws-bill-in-minutes/ By Robert McMillan Wired Enterprise Wired.com April 27, 2012 When Panos Ipeirotis checked his Amazon Web Services bill last week, he started to sweat. It was $1,177.76 -- much more than he’d ever been charged before -- and it was going up another $50 to $100 with each passing hour. He had no idea why. After a some investigation, he found the problem. He had accidentally invented a brand new type of internet attack, thanks to an idiosyncrasy in the online spreadsheets Google runs on its Google Docs service, and he had inadvertently trained this attack on himself. He calls it a Denial of Money attack, and he says others could be susceptible too. As the world moves more and more information to cloud services from the likes of Amazon and Google, these services don’t always interact as effectively as they should. Amazon Web Services can save you money, but Ipeirotis’ tale also shows that there are cases where the cloud can backfire. Ipeirotis, an information operations professor at New York University, had created a pretty unusual spreadsheet. As part of an experiment in how to use crowdsourcing to generate descriptions of images, he had posted thumbnails of 25,000 pictures into a Google document, and then he invited people to describe the images. The problem was that these thumbnails linked back to original images stored on Amazon’s S3 storage service, and apparently, Google’s servers went slightly bonkers. “Google just very aggressively grabbed the images from Amazon again and again and again,” he says. Soon Google had sucked nearly nine terabits of bandwidth from Ipeirotis’ Amazon storage servers. And bandwidth like that costs money. [...] _______________________________________________ LayerOne Security Conference May 26-27, Clarion Hotel, Anaheim, CA http://www.layerone.orgReceived on Mon Apr 30 2012 - 00:08:21 PDT
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