The Networks Solutions hack attack, which may have netted over 570,000 credit card details may be the first of many targeted at the giant networks using cloud computing says Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer of data security specialists Imperva

Shulman said, “the basic problem is that the rise of cloud computing, with many more companies now hosting their data on the Internet, makes such databases and the servers they are hosted on, phenomenally attractive.

“The attackers here aimed on the big prize, the servers. Instead of dealing with a site here and there, once they broke into the hosting servers and all the sites were open to them.

“The lesson: once you’ve penetrated the cloud, you’ve got an easy path to the important, underlying data.”

Network Solutions says that malware planted on its servers appears to be at the heart of the data loss. Click the following link for the full story of the Networks Solutions security breach.

Cloud computing, when properly set-up, isn’t any more inherently dangerous than any other form or remote data storage or hosting, it is simply that some ecommerce server networks that store up to 10,000 ecommerce sites are a tasty single target for hackers.

If the malware was planted because of slow patch vulnerability application by the IT guys it may be that big is not beautiful in cloud computing?

Smaller cloud computing networks will have fewer servers to keep patched and updated and can do so more quickly and they are inherently less of a target as they contain less financially useful information.

But whatever the size, cloud computing will be safer than their own servers – surveys have shown that vulnerability patches can take between 25 and 55 days to be applied by a company’s own IT departments to their own servers!