Technical, legal and ethical dilemmas: distinguishing risks arising from malware and cyber-attack tools in the ‘cloud’—a forensic computing perspective

While hype around the benefits of ‘cloud computing’increase, challenges in maintaining data security and data privacy have also been recognised as significant vulnerabilities (Ristenpart et al. in Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on computer and communications security, pp 103–115, 2009; Pearson in CLOUD’09, pp 44–52, 2009; Vouk in J Comput Inf Technol 4:235–246, 2008). These vulnerabilities generate a range of questions relating to the capacity of organisations relying on cloud solutions to effectively manage risk. This has become particularly the case as the threats faced by organisations have moved increasingly away from indiscriminate malware to more targeted cyber-attack tools. From forensic computing perspective it has also been recognised that ‘cloud solutions’ pose additional challenges for forensic computing specialists including discoverability and chain of evidence (Ruan et al. in Adv Digital Forensics VII:35–46, 2011; Reilly et al. in Int J Multimedia Image Process 1:26–34, 2011). However, to date there has been little consideration of how the differences between indiscriminate malware and targeted cyber-attack tools further problematize the capacity of organisations to manage risk. This paper also considers these risks and differentiates between technical, legal and ethical dilemmas posed. The paper also highlights the need for organisations to be aware of these issues when deciding to move to cloud solutions.