Amazon rents space on their EC2 cloud servers for as little as .03 cents an hour. The service is designed for businesses that need the space but don’t want to pay for their own servers. Anybody with a couple bucks, a phone number, “name”, email address, password, billing address, and credit card can sign up, which means hackers can get space just like the rest of us average joes. And that’s just what happened in the most recent hacks to the Sony PlayStation network. Bloomberg reports: “A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.”
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