Resource Targeted Cybersecurity Attacks in Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud services give opportunity to use computing as a utility. Cloud infrastructures have an ability to provide resources to its users on demand. These abilities of cloud draw the attention of cyber attackers for possible resource exploitation. The state of the art has a number of contributions which focus on a variety of cloud targeted attacks. In this chapter, we focus on providing an abstract yet comprehensive overview of most important security attacks targeting cloud resources and resource management strategies at the cloud end. We provide details related to economic denial of sustainability (EDoS) attack, side channel attacks, session hijacking using cookies poisoning attacks, malware injection attacks, gray cloud attacks, memory inspection attacks, botcloud and out-cloud attacks, and some of the miscellaneous attacks. The overview provided in this chapter will help the reader to understand the attack methods, possible effects, and possible countermeasures for each of the listed attacks. At the end of the chapter, we provide a set of solution directions related to cloud targeted attacks.