A new piece of research from security providers Stratsec has inferred that some cloud providers are unable to block malicious attacks, which could lead to cyber hackers being able to infiltrate systems in a botnet-styled attack.

As a result, according to the research at the Stratsec Winter School, there was an alarming number of reasons why attacking cloud systems was a good idea, such as being relatively easy to set up, costing less, and taking significantly less time to build.

Instead of a traditional botnet setup whereby an attacker would need to know various programming languages in order to hack into a system, in order to set up a botCloud – defined by Stratsec as a group of cloud instances controlled by malicious entities to initiate cyber-security attacks – the attacker only needs to know the cloud provider’s API and requisite sysadmin knowledge.

Worryingly, the researchers stated that based on their …