Amazon criticised for security of lost passwords

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Amazon has been criticised for relying on insecure methods for granting access to its sites after users claimed to have forgotten their passwords.

According to a report by the Financial Times, researchers at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas showed how users of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services were tricked into using virtual machines that could have included ‘back doors' for snooping.

The report claimed that the developments help illustrate why offsite computing power, data storage, and software have not matured to the level that the largest potential clients would require.

However, Simon Abrahams, head of products at EMEA at Rackspace Hosting, claimed that the report should not cause concern about how data stored offsite or in the cloud is less secure, as breaches almost always happen internally.

Abrahams said: “It is quite wrong to say that these developments help illustrate why offsite computing power, data storage and software, have not matured to the level that the largest potential clients would require.

“The issue is not on-premise versus offsite, it is much more about shared versus dedicated. This sort of occurrence only makes the hybrid approach, where customers choose a combination of private and public clouds, depending on the sensitivity of the information, more compelling.”


See original article on scmagazineuk.com


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