Aren't the cloud providers capable of simply hibernating a VM on their machine to get VM's RAM contents and salvage all the config and keys/passwords/network topology info they want from this dump?
Only if they get to them within 8 hours, per the TorrentFreak article - after which they shut down and require an encryption key to restart. Add in any level of geographic distribution and it would take more than 8 hours to find, subpoena and confiscate rendering that technique useless.
I was rather thinking about an over-cautious (or over-curious) cloud provider that would more or less accidentally make a persistent copy of TPB machine's RAM.
This is obviously quite an unlikely scenario, but still possible.
