Electrical problems and security have undermined the clouds from Amazon last week.

Power outage

The first problem was a power failure at the premises housing the servers in Virginia, United States, 3 to 30 pm local time. An hour later, the workload had affected most of new electricity and could function as before. Electricity is back to 4 h 19 and 9 h 40, everything was normal.

Companies using servers located in the wards concerned were inevitably affected. This incident was the occasion to recall that there are tools like CloudWatch Amazon's Cloud Performance Center of Apparent Networks and VMware Hyperic to monitor what happens on the cloud and quickly whether the problem comes from its Internet connection or infrastructure.

Vulnerability

The other problem, more serious was the presence of a bot in a cloud environment, managed by Amazon. Discovered by a security firm who was seen by some SPAM, it was a variant of the Zeus bot, a key logger specializes in capturing financial details. The pirates have brought on the Amazon servers taking advantage of this leak on one of the sites hosted by the firm. The files have since been deleted from the system.

If Amazon is not at fault, this problem shows that administrators are imperative to secure its public clouds as well as their alter egos private. This is the first time, to our knowledge, the EC2 servers are used to distribute malware. It remains to be seen whether this practice will become more popular or not, what could ash development solutions like EC2.