One troubling trend uncovered in the Sony breach is that hackers view the cloud not necessarily as a target, but as a resource. Hackers used stolen credit cards to rent Amazon EC2 servers and launch the crippling attack on Sony.

"Everything the cloud offers to legitimate businesses it offers to criminals as well," says Scott Roberts, senior intelligence specialist at , a security monitoring company. "It's becoming common for cyber-criminals to rent cloud infrastructure to set up spambots or to build out a malware command and control infrastructure. At $50 or $60 a month, attackers can take advantage of resources that a few years ago would be too difficult and too expensive to build on their own."

Add cheap infrastructure to low-cost, automated malware kits, botnets that can be rented for a single attack and the ability to outsource such things as the decoding of CAPTCHAS for spammers, and you have a toxic arsenal that can make even simpleton hackers highly dangerous.

Yet, even if hackers aren't specifically targeting the cloud right now, most experts believe that they will start to soon, if for no other reason than the fact that more and more resources are being moved to the cloud. "The cloud is already a tempting target," Eng said. "Data is centralized and you can target one provider to attack multiple companies."