ReadWriteWeb

At last week's Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, a number of security researchers demonstrated new ways of attacking cloud computing services. One of the more notable presentations, "Clobbering the Cloud," looked at the vulnerabilities in Amazon's cloud infrastructure, Apple's MobileMe service, and Salesforce.com's cloud platform. Another demonstration showed how both Microsoft and Amazon used insecure methods for password retrieval. And still another presentation examined how the supposedly secure protocol SSL could be defeated.

But hacks alone aren't the only dangers to be found when moving to the cloud, as the Black Hat presentations quickly made clear. In reviewing the dangers brought up by the researchers, it was enough to make anyone wonder: is cloud computing putting us and our data at risk?