Exploration of Vulnerabilities, Threats and Forensic Issues and its impact on the Distributed Environment of Cloud and its mitigation

Abstract

Cloud computing environment offers many services which have attracted the criminals or oppugners to commit cyber-crimes in a more sophisticated manner. Most of the crimes conducted by the criminals are data tampering, spam assaults, distributed denial of service attack and many others. There is a deficiency of reports which relates crime and the usage of cloud computing services. This paper discusses about the threat model STRIDE and the ill-use of the cloud services for many mischievous purpose by the oppugners around the world. This paper employs STRIDE threat modelling approach as a reference to relate the attacks to threats. Some of the malicious activities committed using cloud are distribution of considerable amount of spams, using the cloud service provider’s reputation to cheat the firewalls, distributed denial of service, virus dissemination, credit card fraud and arraying the botnet command and control servers. This paper also discusses on a few real websites which have been affected by threats in the recent years. Most of the criminals get away because of lack of evidence. Evidence collection and analysis in the digital world and especially in cloud environment is a great challenge. This paper also touches on a few issues of forensics in cloud computing environment.