Amazon and GoDaddy Are the Biggest Malware Hosters

An anonymous reader writes "The United States is the leading malware hosting nation, with 44 percent of all malware hosted domestically, according to Solutionary. The U.S. hosts approximately 5 times more malware than the second-leading malware-hosting nation, Germany, which is responsible for 9 percent of the detected malware. The cloud is allowing malware distributors to create, host and remove websites rapidly, and major hosting providers such as Amazon, GoDaddy and Google have made it economical for malicious actors to use their services to infect millions of computers and vast numbers of enterprise systems."

Re:Expected

[trongey]

So, is it your assumption that size is directly responsible for the malware? Why can't a large hosting company also institute the best protection mechanisms to reduce their malware content? GoDaddy I can see not giving a crap, but Amazon should do some proper management to reduce this problem.

Do you realize how much business they would lose if they did that?
You can't just kick off all your best customers.

This is why company's block Amazon EC2.

[urbanriot]

I often interact with large companies' IT departments and the general ID is to completely block all Amazon EC2 servers to prevent spam, malware attacks and access to filter bypass services like Ultrasurf, regardless of the possibility of legitimate sites hosted on Amazon. Occasionally they'll make exceptions for port 80 but the idea is basically, "since Amazon is complicit in hosting so much malicious or nefarious crap on the internet, just block Amazon."

Well, you can spin it as a national issue...

[Ecuador]

I mean, the whole problem is the legal framework, which is focused on dealing with the wrong issues. Imagine if instead of malware you attempted to host copyrighted content on Amazon or GoDaddy or whomever else. Immediate takedown of the content and people coming after you. If you host malware on the other hand, meh, as long as Amazon gets paid they can host it without getting into trouble.
When I say it is a national issue, I don't mean it is only a US issue. It is a national issue for every country that writes the laws that corps ask for. Well, of course, it is the only country that I know off where corporate bribes are institutionalized, but that's another story.

Re:no way the biggest hosts

[cerberusti]

Amazon does control spam to at least some extent. They sent me an e-mail asking about it when one of the servers I have there started sending e-mail.

They asked me to describe my use case and set a new limit on outgoing messages.

Serving malware is probably difficult to do much about. I doubt they can directly scan servers for it (for a variety of reasons) and it would be difficult to distinguish from normal web traffic (especially if encrypted.) This probably means they need to wait for a problem before they can do something about it.

I suppose they could require more information about their customers, or include a waiting period on servers... but nobody does that, and in my opinion it would be unreasonable to require it of them.