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Well the Guardian isn't known for fact checking.

Currently wikileaks is at http://88.80.13.160, which belongs to "prq Inet - Access" based in Sweden. Greenham Common itself has been returned to civilian use, and most of it is being turned back into countryside and held in trust. The missile silos are being turning into a historical monument. There is a small business park, which does have a company providing secure hosting in one of the old bunkers (which I guess is sort of "an abandoned US nuclear weapons base at Greenham Common", but not quite, saying abandoned gives the idea of secret hackers stringing ethernet at night whilst no-one sees). The same company also hosts in an old radar station in Kent, at, Marshborough Road, Sandwich.

However the UK is not a good choice for hosting this sort of thing; our libel laws are open to all sorts of abuse these days, there's a tendency right now for individuals to sue in the UK high court for libel over publications which aren't even available in the UK, so called "libel holidays". Whilst secure hosting is all very nice marketing speak when the laws of the land will conspire against you then the security of your hosting is secondary; after all, really, what are they worried about? A company hiring a rogue agent to fire bomb the hosting? Most hosting facilities have large fences, gates and security, and a bunch are undergound. Being ex-military land doesn't improve security that much.

3m thick walls, TEMPEST shielding, fences, dogs, even frickin' EMP protection...

The InfoBunker, the Iowa site mentioned in TFA, is one of a number of cold war missile and/or communications facilities being used as data centers. The PJM Interconnection, which runs the East Coast power grid, is setting up a data center in a Pennsylvania site once used for White House-to-Kremlin communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bunker in the UK is in a former Ministry of Defense command-and-control center. Ask.com is building a major data center in the Titan building in Moses Lake, Washington, a former missile control facility.

I am sure some narcistic, evil doctor would be very interested in acquiring a cave of his own (raises pink) muhahaha !

Or, on a more serious note, we could just make a nice secure colocation facility there, beats Sealand or something like Virtu (and there are more like that)...

My point is you're talking crap that you know fuck all about.

> I also don't think anyone expected there to be so many machines attached to each other as we have now.

In 1988 Fidonet had already been running for 4 years.

Compuserve had POPs all over Europe.

I first encountered Cabir in King's Cross train station in London, I'd left my Bluetooth on after toothing on the train.

If you think people are unprepared, walk into a pub and search for Bluetooth handsets. And if you think that Joe Average has the slightest fucking clue about Bluetooth security you are deluded.

Bluetooth has an insecure history

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/06/HNblueto othvulnerable_1.html

June 06, 2005

Two security researchers say they have discovered a technique for taking control of Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, even when the handsets have security features switched on.

http://www.thebunker.net/security/bluetooth.htm

  In November 2003, Adam Laurie of A.L. Digital Ltd. discovered that there are serious flaws in the authentication and/or data transfer mechanisms on some bluetooth enabled devices. Specifically, three vulnerabilities have been found:

Firstly, confidential data can be obtained, anonymously, and without the owner's knowledge or consent, from some bluetooth enabled mobile phones. This data includes, at least, the entire phonebook and calendar, and the phone's IMEI.

> Buffer overflows are no longer "rare".

That would be rare not "rare".

When have buffer overflows ever been rare ?

You *almost* sound like you know what you are talking about.

yup, don't block the motorways for the important people!

Interestingly the UK government are selling off the main government bunker, many have been sold off before but the former was the main one where the Prime Minister and government would go, the Turnstile site over 35 acres underground!

The Bunker is a data center housed in a former missile base in the UK. It's underground, which makes cooling much easier, and has highly redundant commercial power feeds in addition to the stuff they've added themselves. Being able to recycle that kind of space kept their construction costs low and keeps their cooling costs low, and it also looks cool, which has been useful for them to sell service to bankers and other reliability-paranoid types.

Think secure facilities with guards, shielded rooms and computers, and vaults.

Like the Bunker?

On and I forgot.

They love open source.

So they could be reading! *waves* hl

In the UK The Bunker is an old nuclear shelter turned into a secure webhosting facility.

The guy who owns it wrote 'Stay Another Day' performed by East 17 and was a UK Christmas #1.

Fact.

No. This isn't about football.;-) pj

In the UK The Bunker is an old nuclear shelter turned into a secure webhosting facility.

The guy who owns it wrote 'Stay Another Day' performed by East 17 and was a UK Christmas #1.

Fact.

No. This isn't about football.;-) qfp

In the UK The Bunker [thebunker.net] is an old nuclear shelter turned into a secure webhosting facility.

The guy who owns it wrote 'Stay Another Day' performed by East 17 and was a UK Christmas #1.

Fact.

No. This isn't about football.;-) xjo

In the UK The Bunker [thebunker.net] is an old nuclear shelter turned into a secure webhosting facility.

The guy who owns it wrote 'Stay Another Day' performed by East 17 and was a UK Christmas #1.

Fact.

No. This isn't about football.;-) awk

Server's down, here is another one ;-)

bh-win-04-kret.pdf

*Sigh* I don't know what the editors are thinking when they post direct links to pdf files. Slashdotted instantly. Luckily, throwing the filename at google turned up a mirror.

On and I forgot.

They love open source.

So they could be reading! *waves*

In the UK The Bunker is an old nuclear shelter turned into a secure webhosting facility.

The guy who owns it wrote 'Stay Another Day' performed by East 17 and was a UK Christmas #1.

Fact.

No. This isn't about football. ;-)

like this..?

The Bunker is a real bunker, designed to survive a nuclear war. This high tech relic of the Cold War is built to more stringent specifications than other secure colocation facilities.

• The central core of The Bunker is totally inaccessible to all except our security team.

Or are the techs just not allowed to leave? :-)

If you want physically secure hosting, try The Bunker. This place really has barbed wire fences, blast doors, airlocks, EMP shielding, UPSs, and Diesel generators.

Steve.

see, for example, The Bunker, which was built during the 70's and 80's, and uses rotational inertia for 'power smoothing'. Their Tech Info pages are an interesting read, and there's a nice photo of their 'Power Buffers', too. This might be a bit overkill to run in your basement, though.

see, for example, The Bunker, which was built during the 70's and 80's, and uses rotational inertia for 'power smoothing'. Their Tech Info pages are an interesting read, and there's a nice photo of their 'Power Buffers', too. This might be a bit overkill to run in your basement, though.

see, for example, The Bunker, which was built during the 70's and 80's, and uses rotational inertia for 'power smoothing'. Their Tech Info pages are an interesting read, and there's a nice photo of their 'Power Buffers', too. This might be a bit overkill to run in your basement, though.

The Bunker is an ex-RAF Radar Tracking Station, designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike. It has been decomissioned and bought by a private company to serve as a "Britain's ultimate safe house" for hosting and colocation of servers. I wonder if the Exodus data centers have airtight blast doors?

----

But seriously, your description of Exodus reminds me of The Bunker in the UK (I think this was featured on Slashdot a few months back), which is housed in a decommisioned nuclear bunker. Sadly, The Bunker has no kevlar walls (as far as I know), though it does have "blast proof" doors, a "high security" electric fence and HERF protection. The fact that there's a demand for this type of facility shows how important web servers are to some corporations.

The Code War has begun.

I remember a fictional story in Wired about a team of terrorists using a combination of cyberterrorism and automated systems to nearly bring the country to its knees. They did things like electromagnetic pulse bombs (to cripple computer systems) and taking down power grids and other parts of infrastructure mostly controlled by computers. On the more traditional side, they booby-trapped their (evacuated) base with a machine gun set up with servos and motion detectors to automatically fire at anyone nearby.

I'm surprised that cyberwarfare has taken this long to really become established (although there were rumours about USA-paid hackers and crackers attacking the systems of enemies recently, they aren't confirmed). Most likely the reason is that most of the enemies and potential enemies aren't as reliant on computer systems and networks as most countries. Sure, you could probably mess up the computer networks of your average EU member pretty badly, and that would probably deal more damage than a dozen cruise missiles, but we aren't exactly at war (or likely to be at war) with those countries.

Really, the most vulnerable country is the USA itself. As the article tells us, many critical networks are vulnerable to infiltration. The only conceivable reasons that they haven't been a large target of terrorism are:

A) Terrorists usually don't want to do damage on that large a scale. Terrorism is all about showing strength and instilling terror into the populace, but not doing a lot of damage. Terrorists would rather kill 5 people with a bomb in Times Square, which is a concrete and very real threat and would make a lot of people afraid, than disrupt the power grid of the eastern seaboard. The power grid problem would be big (especially if they could bring it down for days or weeks at a time) but it isn't as 'real' as a bomb or other violent threat.

B) Many terrorists don't have the skills and equipment needed to do that kind of thing. You need pretty good programming skills to infiltrate an important database and disrupt in a concrete, immediately noticeable and threatening way. It is very easy to build a pipe bomb and plant it somewhere, in comparison.

Besides that, you need an internet connection and a computer, which can cost money that a terrorist group doesn't have.

C) The biggest terrorist threat nowadays is groups that aren't making ransom demands, but are just trying to kill people. Fanatical groups that believe that [insert group] is evil, for instance. They won't give any warning, they won't make any demands, and they won't have any sort of logical targets for their attacks.

For instance, the PLO and IRA were political groups who wanted to be recognized as such, and for that reason were relatively mellow, not trying to come across as ruthless or crazy. Since they had political agendas, they made attacks which made sense when analyzed and someone who was studying the situation might make logical guesses as to vulnerable areas. For them, disrupting power grids and such would be a logical target because it isn't very lethal but it is VERY inconvienant and noticeable, and as such gets them press coverage. For a fanatical group, cyberterrorism isn't as useful as violence because it doesn't really kill anyone and the effects don't last very long.


I'm willing to bet that cyberwarfare will be used in more subtle ways than terrorism and direct attacks.

It seems like it would be ideal for espionage (although most important information will be encrypted, ANY information is useful. If you know that something was sent from a certain place to a certain other place, even if you don't know what the message was, you can make logical guesses about what it meant: see Cryptonomicon for a good example of this) and also sabotage (like the man in that article said: it would be excellent to disrupt missile defence systems right before an air raid). Taking down the power grid wouldn't be as useful against a military target, which will likely have generators (remember that decommisioned bunker that got turned into a data storage facility? check it out here. That place has diesel generators that'll last a couple months, i think). But I'd expect that most of the important systems won't be accessible: you'd probably have to physically infiltrate the target to get into a missile control system. A military-only optical fiber network might be common if cyberwarfare is dangerous enough. In that case, you'd need a combination of skilled hackers and crackers (to do the actual cyberwarfare) and normal soldiers (to get into the country and infiltrate the military network).

Hmm, sounds like a cheezy computer game/action flick.

EMP weapons have been around for years and have been deployed commercially since the 80s. If you know the right people you can buy a unit which you just fit over the road from you competitor and they suffer severe IT problems! (Not to mention cancer etc!)

A single cellphone can bring down a 747, so what is the big news?

If security is important, then put your equipment somewhere it can't be hit by radio or magnetic pulses. More to the point, the radio the computers emit cannot be intercepted either!!

Check out www.thebunker.net for a safe haven for all computers! Nuclear proof!