Thousands upon thousands of people use Amazon Web Services to host their websites — including some of the most tenacious malware distributors in the world.
A new study from IT security firm Solutionary reveals the top 10 sites that distribute the most malware. Amazon hosts four of them, including the top malware hosting site, download-instantly.com.
The report notes that hackers like using cloud-based web-hosting services like Amazon and GoDaddy due to their low costs and easy set-up processes, which give attackers an efficient way to develop and push out malicious sites. Amazon hosts the most malware distributors with 16 percent of them, while GoDaddy hosts 14 percent.
“The cloud has become a preferred mode for malicious actors who are using cloud computing for many of the same reasons that legitimate customers are,” reads Solutionary’s study.
The study also found that 44 percent of the world’s malware is hosted within the United States:
Solutionary also noted that the cloud-based hosting services let malware distributors avoid detection because they can create IP addresses in a trusted space and don’t need to worry about being blocked by geographic blacklists, for example.
Amazon has a full page dedicated to vulnerability reporting, which you can check out here.
