How Safe is Cloud Computing? Don’t Ask the Treasury Department

The Treasury Department blamed a cloud computing provider for the disruption of its Web site that provides the Internet face of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the agency that prints U.S. currency. A blog Monday reported that the sites were hacked. As of Tuesday afternoon, the bureau’s Web site was inaccessible. On Tuesday, Treasury issued the following statement: “The Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) entered the cloud computing arena last year. The hosting company used by BEP had an intrusion and as a result of that intrusion, numerous websites (BEP and non-BEP) were affected. On May 3, the Treasury Government Security Operations Center was made aware of the problem and subsequently notified BEP. BEP has four Internet address URLs all pointing to one public website. Those URLs are; BEP.gov; BEP.treas.gov; Moneyfactory.gov and Moneyfactory.com. BEP has since suspended the Web site. Through discussions with the provider, BEP is aware of the remediation steps required to restore the site and is currently working toward resolution.” Treasury did not identify the host company. The chief research officer for IT security software vendor AVG wrote in his blog that “for a short while (Monday) a couple of treas.gov websites were hacked, and were reaching out to an attack site in Ukraine.” He added: “They had been script injected with the line of code. BTW, you should not mess with the attack site. It was dead earlier (Monday), but could easily come back to life.”

Tweet your comments on cloud computing as the concept gains traction in the security industry. Tweet to http://twitter.com/securitymag