Security researcher Will Dormann of the US Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) has reported this week that over 350 apps from the Google Play and Amazon App stores have been compromised due to a flaw that fails to validate certificates over a secure socket layer.

The bug, which opens up many popular mobile applications such as the eBay mobile shopper and the Microsoft Tech Companion to fairly rudimentary man-in-the-middle attacks, has been tracked and logged by the CERT team for only about a week now. But instead of waiting the standard 45-days to silently communicate the problem to the affected companies in order to give them a chance to get out in front of the issue with appropriate patches.

Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in distributed search engine software Elasticsearch to install DDoS malware on Amazon and possibly other cloud servers.

Elasticsearch is an increasingly popular open-source search engine server developed in Java that allows applications to perform full-text search for various types of documents through a REST API (representational state transfer application programming interface). Because it has a distributed architecture that allows for multiple nodes, Elasticsearch is commonly used in cloud environments. It can be deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and other cloud platforms.