Cloud & Telecom Security

It’s reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was looking at a report by a research scientist in China that shows how a well-placed attack against a small power subnetwork could trigger a cascading failure of the entire West Coast power grid. It’s an inspiring finding from unique viewpoint. A slight bite by injection into the grid might lead to an overwhelming avalanche. Isn’t it horrible?

However, what I am thinking is that Internet cloud services have many similarity to those of power grid, ie. these threats and potential attacks are very possibly valid to Internet clouds.  What and how Internet clouds respond/react to these potential similar attacks to those against power grid? Yes, those dominant cloud service providers have very robust and strong infrastructure all over the world, how large the bandwidth, how many the servers, how many square feet the data centers, blah blah. Further, there are automatic load balancing and distribution system among those distributed data centers.  Once one set of servers and/or circuits, the services would be transfered to other servers and circuits automatically. Your services WILL be there, keeping the same, or NOT? Read more…