Analysis and prevention of account hijacking based incidents in cloud environment

Abstract

Cloud computing is a technological breakthrough in computing. It has affected each and every part of the information technology, from infrastructure to the software deployment, from programming to the application maintenance. Cloud offers a wide array of solutions for the current day computing needs aided with benefits like elasticity, affordability and scalability. But at the same time, the incidence of malicious cyber activity is progressively increasing at an unprecedented rate posing critical threats to both government and enterprise IT infrastructure. Account or service hijacking is a kind of identity theft and has evolved to be one of the most rapidly increasing types of cyber- attack aimed at deceiving end users. This paper presents an in depth analysis of a cloud security incident that happened on The New York Times online using account hijacking. Further, we present incident prevention methods and detailed incident prevention plan to stop future occurrence of such incidents.