Most Abused Cloud Providers — Hosting Networks Used for Cyber Attacks

Why Cloud Providers Are Abused

Cloud platforms are not inherently insecure, but several characteristics make them attractive to threat actors:

• Low cost and instant provisioning — Attackers can spin up virtual machines for a few dollars or use free-tier credits to launch attacks. API-driven provisioning means infrastructure can be created and destroyed programmatically, making it difficult to trace.
• Clean IP reputation — Newly provisioned cloud IPs often have no history in blocklists, allowing attackers to bypass reputation-based security controls until enough reports accumulate.
• Jurisdiction shopping — Global cloud providers operate in many regions. Attackers can deploy infrastructure in jurisdictions where abuse complaints are slow to process or where legal cooperation is limited.
• Scale and anonymity — Large cloud providers manage millions of IPs. Individual malicious instances are difficult to distinguish from legitimate workloads, and stolen payment methods are commonly used to create accounts.

What This Means for Security Teams

Seeing a major cloud provider on this list does not mean you should block all traffic from that network. These providers host millions of legitimate services — blocking an entire ASN like Amazon AWS would break access to countless websites and APIs.

Instead, security teams should:

• Use IP-level threat intelligence to identify and block specific malicious addresses rather than entire networks
• Apply enhanced monitoring for traffic from cloud providers, especially for authentication endpoints
• Implement rate limiting and behavioral analysis to detect automated attacks from cloud infrastructure
• Integrate the WAYSCloud API to check IPs in real time before allowing access