I recently came across this blog post Malware-as-a-Service over at Splunk.
The folks who are developing large networks of compromised PC’s, for running DDOS attacks, mining for personal information, distributing SPAM, and other evil purposes need a place for their virus-infected systems to “phone home”. A place to control and manage their dark virtual empires.
If you are writing an app that needs to scale fast, potentially exponentially, and you want to be able to move out of the business quickly leaving minimal traces, and to start with as little initial overhead as possible (ie, not set up a data center) a cloud provider is the way to go.
I can think of a number of applications which bad guys might be able to leverage this technology for.
Should cloud providers care if they are also enablers of evil? How do they decide?