It has emerged that Amazon's EC2 cloud-based infrastructure was used by the hackers that made off with the personal details of over 80 million users on Sony's PlayStation Network.  The fact that EC2 can be leveraged for illicit activities should come as no surprise; the abuse of cloud computing infrastructure to perform brute force password cracking was reported as far back as 2009.

The admission that hackers have staged an unprecedented cyberattack using EC2, though, could certainly throw open Pandora's Box where defending from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks or other sophisticated online aggression is concerned. 

In addition, IT managers and CIOs may now be forced to factor in the ability of black hat hackers to tap into vast computing farms to perform various forms of brute force cracking.  As observed by IBTimes, hackers could also make use of server farms from Microsoft or Amazon--for example, to better cover their tracks and therefore make finding them a much harder task.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at IBTimes
- check out this article at Bloomberg

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