The researchers at Texas-based Halcyon said that a company called Cloudzy had been leasing servers space and reselling it to around 17 different state-sponsored hacking groups from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Vietnam.?
The CEO of Cloudzy Nozari said that his firm could not be held responsible for its clients of which he estimated only 2 percent were malicious. In LinkedIn, he said, “If you are a knife factory, are you responsible if someone misuses the knife? Trust me I hate those criminals and we do everything we can to get rid of them.”
To the digital defenders the case is an example of how hackers and ransomware gangs use small firms operating at the fringes of cyberspace to enable hacks. On the other hand, the Halcyon says that around half of the CloudzyÂ’s business was malicious which include renting services to two ransomware groups.
An executive at Halcyon, Ryan Golden said, “It’s rogues’ gallery on that through one providers.” CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm said that it had not seen state-sponsored hackers using Cloudzy but it seen other cybersecurity activity connected to it.