[Const-me]

Windows Azure datacenters have more than 1 million servers combined. They all run Windows, and unlike those cheap XBoxes, they are powered on 24/7 and connected to very fast fiber optics.

If you think Windows is an immediate easy target, why don’t you run your botnet on Azure?

[Spivak]

Because, I would hope, the people running boxes on Azure are run by IT people who are about security. Not the case for consumer hardware.

Taking control of a few Azure accounts might be worth a few hundred Xbones but which one is easier and more likely to go unnoticed?

[Const-me]

> run by IT people who are about security

People who are about security can secure 10 servers. Manually securing 1 million of them is prohibitively expensive.

MS have the technology to secure them by default. Key part of this technology is hardware-assisted virtualization + hypervisor.

The same architecture runs MS XBox one, MS Azure, and many other products like Amazon EC2.

> Taking control of a few Azure accounts

Accounts? How about actual, hardware servers?