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Escape from Data Alcatraz
nihilist_1137 writes "Zdnet is reporting on a new information facility that is built to surive the worst.Triangular in shape, two of the sides house offices while the third, a large rectangular block if taken in isolation, contains two data centres, as well as the infrastructure to ensure that Web sites continue to function come fire, flood, natural catastrophy or foreign invasion."
"Remember thealamo.com!"
Seriously, though... you're saying they can stand up to repeated shelling by artillery? Or infantry-placed demo charges? Or anything else an invading force is likely to have?
WHY????
If you're being invaded, you've got more important things to worry about than if your company's web site will stay up!
The other half of this is: What if the invasion is an invasion of illegal immigrant workers? Can this thing survive having a janitor who's been slipped a hundred bucks (three weeks pay) to pull out a wire here and there?
If we all die from nuclear fallout who will reboot the NT servers?
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
Never Underestimate The Power Of Human Stupidity.
Trapped in Time... Surrounded by Evil... Low on Gas.
Thank god that freecreditreport.com and anything associate with the X10 camera would still be available if a nuke wiped out my neighborhood.
I read the article. It is fine. Plenty of interesting points and all that jazz. However, I have the ask the obvious questions: Is it secure from hacking? Seriously. I read the article and it seems like a physically secure place, but is it secure electronically? From "real" attacks? From the kinds of attacks that happen all of the time?
(start sinister laugh)
I can just see some script kiddie taking the place down. That would be too funny.
(end sinister laugh)
How to Download YouTube Videos
Built initially to house currency, the Hostworks data centre in the suburb of Kidman Park, Adelaide is a tribute to the profligacy of Timothy Marcus Clark, [snip] Nestled in a semi-industrial area, with minimum road signage, it is at once unassuming, virtually impenetrable and to this day an inspirational feet of excess engineering.
Unassuming feet? What, size 5 1/2 D?
It would be nice to see a couple pictures of the interior like most data centers, even if it is a secure area. At least maybe some flash animations. :(
Thanks,
--
Matt
"And, of course, we spared no expense with our software, either: We installed the latest versions of IIS, Windows XP and Outlook on every machine in the datacenter to make absolutely sure that no one can get unauthorized access to anything on our servers! Everybody knows that software you pay a lot for is more secure than that free stuff. Microsoft says so!"
Get busy living or get busy dying. Carpe diem.
I would much rather have a data center that concentrates more on getting patches and other server-based security issues applied rather than chasing the very slim chance of a foreign invasion. I think it's more likely for someone to crack my colo than it is for a fire to melt it.
http://www.hostworks.com.au/datacentre_tour.html
/.'ing
let's see if it can withold a
Some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground.
Oliver's army is here to stay Oliver's army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else But here today
"The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure..." [George Orwell, 1984]
Kinda scary.
We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade.
Yeah, very nice. However if you're big enough to house servers there you should be big enough to have servers in multiple smaller/less available locations and have Akamai or some other internet wide distributed provider load balance between them.
Looks like a big basket to me. Would you put all your eggs there?
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
I think Jon Katz has taken a pseudonym!
m00.
Remember, we now have to deal with the possiblity of using large aircraft as weapons :-(
and Silos are designed to take pretty heavy hits and physical attacks.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I am SURE that this building can survive a hit by a 2,000 pound bomb or a daisycutter. This is not the 1800's, the invaders would have enough weaponry to level this building...
This is nice, but it protects a single point of failure. If you want to take these servers down, just attack the provider they depend on...
{{.sig}}
At first this seems almost like a joke. Who would invest this much time and energy into such a fortress just to house data? Well... banks for one. Imagine banks from around the world storing their data here in a highly encrypted form, updated at least daily. it would require alot of bandwith to say the least, but wouldn't that security be worth it to investors?
Less crucial information that needn't be updated regularly could find a home here at a discounted price. Take for example, building plans. Every city, county, and State in America has a plan somewhere for every building its ever built that lists (among other things) the locations of all wiring and plumbing. This isn't terribly confidential information (though it very well may become so for large buildings with a realistic threat of terrorist attacks) and could be modestly encrypted with read access only granted to the owner.
Copyright owners might be interested in it as a way of saving back-ups of their paper-work that cannot be destroyed by some freak accident.
I for one don't like these ideas because they represent too many eggs in one basket. When information security is required, it is my personal belief that having it stored in a known location that every hacker in the world would drool over to get inside is a bad idea. History has shown, however, that not everyone (indeed few people) listen to me.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
Remember the Maginot Line? Impregnable? How easy was it to get around that? Data is useful in direct proportion to its accessibility - cut the connections into this place and it's toast. No frontal attack necessary.
:)
Also, the article says they can expand capacity 300%. Frankly, that sounds like pretty short-term planning to me. In my experience, it's a rare data store that doesn't double in size every year or two.
Still, it sounds like a cool place, and probably has a better climate than Sealand
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Triangular in shape, two of the sides house offices while the third, a large rectangular block if taken in isolation, contains two data centres, as well as the infrastructure to ensure that Web sites continue to function come fire, flood, natural catastrophy or foreign invasion.
Let's see... a Web site is a certain machine to which people connect, if you can't connect to it it's useless. You don't need to bomb the place, you just need to cut the fiber coming out of the building...
I got your data safety right here. They answer to nobody, since they have their owm government.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
I was close to being in charge of a small-scale version of this concept last year (financing fell through) - we had the bunker/air raid shelter staked out and all. We were going to offer secure web hosting but mostly going for the off-site data backup and storage market - kinda like an underground Sealand, without the AAA. :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
What happens if they outgrow their facility? I mean, what they have seems pretty well designed for anything short of a war, I guess, but how do you cope with success?
Then again, I guess the obvious answer would be to build another one, assuming that growth==success==more money (although I'm not so sure that I'd assume that!)
They claim room for 300% growth, but still...it certainly sounds like they're virtually the only game in town...er, on the continent. Is 300% enough?
-h-
The article is pretty high level, but interesting none the less. I'm skeptical that is really as secure as they say it is. It would seem that any building which relies on outside connections would be vulnerable if those connections were cut. Not to mention that the air towers that were mentioned could be closed off, etc.
It seems to me that the best defence would be geographically distributed datacenters synced up on a regular basis. Of course you would have to deal with data syncing, and perhaps a master-slave relationship amongst the datacenters, but these are relatively simple problems to solve, compared to preparing for a nuclear or other attack...
Take care,
Brian
--
Only a few Free Palm m100's left...
--
survive a direct attact when the ditch witch I rented three hours ago cuts through all the fiber conduits down the street.
... traditionally, data is not cracked by attacking its physical form. Kevin Mitnick :-) always said the easier way to get information was only some small and simple conversations with people who work where one wants to crack.
"So, where do you go on vacations? Are you married? What's your spouse's name? What's your favorite sports team? Any music style preferred?", etc...
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
oh say someone decides to crash a couple of 767's full of jet fuel on it......
You have to consider the extremes that someone may go to to take out what every may be hosted there nomatter how short term it would be...
Or in a more realistic world a good ol DDOS attack... Or your bandwidth carrier goes under....
the world is a harsh place for people who claim to be secure
#include sig.h
Most 'good' datacenters have the same things. Multiple connections to power, water, electricity - good physical security et al. I've worked at and visited many datacenters, and nothing here outside of the ability to withstand explosives is all that different from anything else I've seen stateside. The big difference is that they're dumb enough to advertise it.
I'm glad ZDNet has the time to waste on stories like this. Physical security is nothing without a secure network to run in. All the `dead man zone's` in the world mean nothing if it isn't backed up on the network side by a good solid firewall.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
By far, the cheapest and most effective method of redundant systems is to just safe your money and not buy fancy equipment for one place, but to spend it on cheap equipment is several places. That way, who cares if someone takes out an entire hosting center, leaving only a 100 ft dep crater. You still have servers running in California and Asia.
The Domain Name System doesn't rely on a huge Fort Knox-like system. It simply has 13 (?) different places throughout the world where amazingly cheap (for its importance) equipment resides. Even if North America sinks to the bottom of the Ocean, DNS should still happily resolve.
Expensive (but impressive) measures are not the answer to reliability. Geographic diversity of cheap systems is the answer most most applications. Today, we have incremental transfer protocols such as rsync that will even transfer massive databases back and forth by only sending the changes. It's largely marketing, unwarrented by technical considerations, that make companies spend so much money on these extra sigmas of reliability.
Physical security is a Good Thing (tm), but what about Network security. It'd be a familar gut wrenching feeling for the suits who came up with the idea to build the most secure Data warehouse in the world and then run IIS as the server.
Besides, what location in the real world is actually physically secure? I'm sure that Bin Laden told his followers that the caves they were going to hide in were 'secure'...
Give me a dozen well trained military operatives, and a couple of geeks and I could take the place, by force and subterfuge. Give me a herf gun and I can make thier secure facility useless.
Hell, Molly Millions could probably take this place on her own.
It's an impressive building designed to withstand all sorts of disaster movie ideas. So what?
As we've all seen time and time again the real threat to computer systems does not come in the form an earthquake, tidal wave, or random highjacked 767. The real threats rear their ugly heads when some idiot user doesn't update his M$Outlook security package, or takes his password out of the dictionary.
I'm not trying to say that physical threats to computer systems aren't important. By all means they are usually the last thing people think about. But the data here is only being protected from physcially being damaged and or lost. There's nothing in that article about firewall's, encryption, open access ports, faulty software, defective hardware, etcetera ad naseum.
The protection of data by the building is just one part of the problem of everything becoming digital. It's by no means the end all solution.
I read Slashdot for the
I don't care how secure they think it is. Give Danny Ocean three weeks and he'll get anything he wants from there.
(Or George Clooney, in a pinch. Yeah, I liked the movie. Cash vault, sure.)
Simple way to take down the site....
3 Letters.... E M P
Haha!!...
So basically, all it'd take to take this center out is a big Electro-Magnetic Pulse generator...
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
l33t H4xor: This is Bob Bigswingingdick, could you reset my password for me?
Helpdesk: Sure thing, but I can't give you the password over the phone, I'll have to give it to your boss.
l33t H4xor: Did you not hear me correctly, This is Bob Bigswingingdick, I don't have a manager. By the way, tell me who your manager is.
Helpdesk: That won't be necessary sir, I'll take care of you.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
These guys host your machines 85' underground. Constant temp and humidity all provided by mother nature.
Check it out.
http://www.usdco.com/
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
And as long as the dot-com boom continues to revolutionize the way we all shop, work, and live, these kinds of 99.999% reliable sites will be very important to us! Because there will be sites other than Amazon and Ebay that cannot withstand even an hour of down time without endangering the very existence of the companies with those sites!
The future lies in big buildings paying big money for big reliable redundant systems with big corporations paying big rent to make sure their big connectivity is almost permanent! Luckily the new pop-up ads will pay for it all!
Why, the only thing stopping people from getting to the completely-reliable sites located there is the fact that 99.99999999% of the routers on the net aren't in that building! But the last two nodes of any traceroute will be absolutely rock-solid! As long as there is some money left to pay bright, qualified network engineers, including 24x7 manned duty! Way to go!
(Phew. I didn't think I had a reserve of enough sarcasm to complete the post.)
Ok, so what did any of this have to do with a big data center? Clearly, you have some things you need to vent.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
When was the last time Austrailia was the target of attack? I'm betting when the English showed up, and before that the Aboriginies (sp?). I'll hedge my bets and allow a random Japanese air raid during WWII. Building a super secure facility in a secure country seems like taking a refrigerator to Antarctica to hold your beer.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
This sort of excess overspending and the lack of emphasis put on _real_ security (i.e. data security rather than physical security) ignores the vastly more likely threat to most company's web servers and database servers (and frankly that's what most of the boxen in these places are - huge rooms full of Yahoo and eBay machines). I'm not saying that a certain degree of security isn't appropriate, but withstanding foreign invasion? Please. The invaders are looking to break in with their armored brigade to the Exodus data center!!! Oh no!! Come on. A modest degree of armed guard presence, a low profile, some generators and massive UPS system - fine, this all makes sense. But you can go overboard.
Anyway, don't take my word for it. Just look at Exodus' stock. Their excesses seemed to ignore the fact that the service they provided just wasn't worth the outrageous amount of money they were charging for it, and these days, the more budget conscious hosting/data center/colo companies are the ones left standing.
"Doors throughout the complex are secured with a Honeywell Access Control System, and staff working at the facility are supplied with a proximity card."
US national labs rejected proximity cards years ago because they could be surreptitiously read out and cloned.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
"...is built to survive the worst."
You got to be kidding. I don't think *anything* can survive the: "/. effect"
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I live/work in a seismically active area and the possibility of conduits/access tunnels being ripped and shifted are a real concern for water, power, and communications (not to mention the commute.) Seems wiser to have mirrors, particularly in sites which each are unlikely to suffer any one of disaster types.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've been a customer at Exodus, and I've toured a number of other data center sites. The centers are generally designed to impress visitors - the "dead man zone" room being a perennial favorite - and to suggest a level of security that isn't truly there. There's a reason that the government doesn't build secure sites in the middle of an industrial park, yet that's often where you find colo/data centers. Also, the number of "sales prospects" triapsing through the data center should suggest that the true security level is lower than advertised.
As far as survivability goes, no matter how much work you put into the power, the redundant data lines, the physical security, there is no true survivability in a single site. (Look at 9/11 - how many WTC companies basically said "we'd have been dead if we didn't set up off-site disaster recovery after the '93 bomb"). Any single building can be disrupted by a determined attacker. You have to use multiple sites to be truly survivable (again, look at the Internet - the whole idea was a distributed, survivable network.
Mmm, comforting. But hey, what you're selling here is a somewhat false sense of security (your website staying up means dick if your economy collapses, for example. So you gotta play the worst case scenario card.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
"Doors throughout the complex are secured with a Honeywell Access Control System, and staff working at the facility are supplied with a proximity card, which allows them access only to a specified area."
US national labs rejected the use of proximity cards years ago because they could be surreptitiously read and cloned.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Grin, at least I got a good laugh out of this. "anything, excepting the few heroes of the revolution that have their own roach filled apartments and must give blow jobs in parks monthly" I'm thinking this guy was one of the roaches. :-P Or maybe somebody that paid for the blowjobs?
Oh, by the way, my boss is curious as to why I have to give blowjobs to pay the rent.. I think that most of the "cells" you speak of probably make 6 figures, easily. I do.
Wouldn't the best security (or at least pretty good) be to NOT advertise it on one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the net? I mean, if you want to physically destroy servers and the hardware that supports them, don't you need to know where they are? Thanks to ZD's article, now we and all other nefarious types know. Thanks John Dvorak! :)
I think they have plenty of beowulf clusters in this building and I also think they run the Linus OS.
[Brown] stops for a moment before continuing the tour and points out some details which make it impossible to escape from the dimly lit metal and glass cell in which he stands.
"It is called the dead mans zone because even if someone manages to get this far into the building, they won't make it any further, and they certainly won't be able to escape," Brown says.
That's assuming that whoever intrudes wants to escape alive.
How does this prevent cyber-martyrs?
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Well, the building seems as secure as anything I've ever heard of, but they never mention what their communication lines are. This is ok if they are primarily concerened with data safety (which they obviously are!), but this kinda falls down if they are trying to provide data accesibility (sp?). Of course, they might (probably?) have the standard fibre plus wireless and satellite. At least I would hope so, otherwise you just have this impenatrable mass in the middle of muck that can't move and can't talk to anyone, but you can't touch without getting your ass blown off.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Making a big, strong safehaven like this and telling everyone negates its effects. Telling everyone about how great your security is gives it a shorter lifetime than the completely not-scure (either from hacking or from "foreigh invasion") computer I'm using to type this. A shitload of physical defences and paranoid geeks are great for security, but not nearly so good as keeping a secret.
I say build it in the middle of a desert, six feet underground, under cover of night.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
It's reassuring to know when the world is enduring The Apocalypse an outlet for pornagraphy will exist for future generations.
They at least got that right - I'm reminded of the old SAGE systems, massive tube-based computers that were part of the nuclear missile system. These monsters were in huge buildings, with 4-foot-thick reinforced concrete walls that could withstand almost anything ... but the cooling system was outside the building. One blast there and the system would melt itself into oblivion.
Has anyone ever looked at Sabre's Data Center?
"The facility is designed to withstand the forces of an F5 tornado"
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Amazingly, for a country originally populated by convicts, Australia seems to be outpacing the US for the honor of being the worst western country in terms of individual liberty (UK, US, AU...it's a three horse race I think). If it were me in that part of the world, I'd pick New Zealand. Unless I were serving AU-domestic customers specifically, I see no reason anyone would colo there; they might as well at least use the US where things are cheap.
Nice specifications, though. A single generator for on-site power is probably a bad idea, though, even with 2 substation feeds; any outage which could take down a substation could easily be system-wide, and some of those take a long time to restore. Witness the 9-11 situation where 111 8th and 60 Hudson (2 of the 3 important NYC carrier facilities) were on extended generators). 111 8th's generator 1) ran out of fuel 2) didn't start due to dust clogging the air filters. And powering up a 2MW diesel every 6 weeks for testing is also bad; should be done weekly or better.
I think it's rather telling that no one is building out bare colos like Exodus, Frontier GlobalCenter, etc. did back in the mid-1990s; there's a glut of raw space except in very specific markets. Managed services or differentiation (by security, expansion of over-capacity carrier hotels, low pricing, etc.), but not by massive up-front capital spending.
The real solution is to house the data in multiple facilities in different countries; and the only security focus should be on protecting the data from theft, not from destruction.
If someone really wants to blow up a builiding, they can do it. It is a lot harder if that building is only part of a redundant network.
All the nickel metal hydride UPSes in the world won't help much in the event of someone showing up at the door with a piece of paper that has laser toner sintered onto it forming the letters S-U-B-P-O-E-N-A, or maybe W-A-R-R-A-N-T. Those scenarios figure a lot bigger in my threat model than do foreign invasion, nuclear power accident, or similar. This data center doesn't seem to do much to protect against them.
Even Havenco isn't as secure against legal threats as they'd like their customers to believe, because as described in their FAQ, they reserve "the right to cancel at will if the customer's web site or service is endangering [Havenco's] access to Internet connectivity". They claim to use that primarily against spammers - but what happens if Disney and AOL-Time-Warner, which together control a whole lot of backbones, politely inform Havenco that site X has to go, or else all Havenco's customers' traffic will be unroutable on Disney's and AOL-Time-Warner's networks?
Note, too, that Havenco forbids content illegal in Sealand, which at the moment consists of and only of "child pornography" - and that sounds perfectly all right, we're decent folk who don't want to support those yucky child pornographers - until you realise that child pornography is not actually defined in Sealand law (Does it include text? Does it include photographs of adults who look younger than 18? Does it include drawings and paintings made without a model?), and that Sealand has not yet determined its official position on "regulations regarding copyright, patents, libel, restrictions on political speech, non-disclosure agreements, cryptography, restrictions on maintaining customer records, tax or mandatory licensing, DMCA, music sharing services, or other issues", and these facts are explicitly stated in Havenco's AUP. You just have to trust that the Prince of Sealand won't do anything you disagree with when it comes time to decide those issues, and that he won't cave in to pressure from other nations or large corporations. How much trust are you willing to put in one person?
The article didn't mention water detectors or sump pumps. These items caused me to fail an audit of an otherwise impeccable raised-floor facility.
People have facitlies built, like those mentioned
The government turns to the Dark Sideê and the good ol' USA starts bombing
The varmints hide out and take advantage of these great designs
Granted, there's a ~50 year old design that does a pretty good job of overcoming modern engineering marvels... the B-52.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Är Du lycklig nu?
Har Vi tid
innan allting tar slut?
The software development for this would be expensive, and performance would be modest, but highly secure, limited-purpose back-end systems would be far better than what we have now.
Designed as a southern Fort Knox, the structure is earthquake proof, bomb resistant, and provides anti ram capabilities.
From the movie Strange Days by James Cameron:
MACE
Take it easy. The glass is bullet resistant.
LENNY
Bullet resistant? Whatever happened to bullet proof?
A Beowulf Clus--aarrruugh!
/.'ers begins lynching him
Drops dead and dies as a mob of angry
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Your post is pure hatred and harassment. You should get arrested for this.
While having your servers nice and secure in a physically impenetrable fortress is all very well and good, it's sort of the physical equivalent to cryptographic security-by-obscurity. It provides a false sense of security, and doesn't address critical vulnerabilities.
Let's face it - someone who wants to take your website down isn't going to do it by physically storming the building! Unless, of course, they're the government - in which case they'll also cut off your internet feed. What good is your 7-week's worth of diesel going to do you then?
Furthermore, it doesn't make any difference how physically secure your boxen are, if you're running an OS with networking vulnerabilities, or are vulnerable to DOS attacks.
The most secure solution is complete redundancy/distribution, in both physical and network space. The most obvious example is Freenet, which sadly isn't quite mainstream-useable yet.
Store your documents in a distributed fashion across thousands of machines. Encrypt them, so even the individual user doesn't know what his cache contains. Cryptographically sign each piece of content you produce. How is anyone going to fuck with your site when it's in a thousand different places?
How about this -- is it invulnerable to someone surrounding the place with a giant loop of wire, and pulsing it to erase all the magnetic media?
(I guess that would have to be a pretty strong current, but how about those fictional (?) EMP bombs?)
Nothing here changes that.
So if Slashdot relocates to Australia, does that mean we can still rely on Slashdot to give us live up-to-date information as the country is being invaded and bombed back to the stone age?
/. effect?
More importantly, can it survive a DDoS?
Can it survive the
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Build your datacenter as an 802.11 linked beowulf cluster mounted on the back of squirrels. Safe from everything but Hawks and Bicyclists.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
so now, in 50 years, when we destroy ourselfs we can rest assured that the internet will survive!!!! thank-god
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I don't mean to be morbid, but from reading the article it seems clear that this building couldn't handle a fully fueled passenger jet being crashed into it.
It's all well and good to defend against those who want to steal, but beyond a certain point, you can't really defend against those who wish to destroy.
If you can't convince clients that it's worth the extra money to have all of this physical security, you can't make money.
In the midst of a global slowdown, are companies going to want to spend that extra money, rather than investing in distributed data warehousing approaches?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
(I guess that would have to be a pretty strong current, but how about those fictional (?) EMP bombs?)
Who says EMP bombs are fictional?
Winn Schwartau (sp?) covers this technology in medium depth in his book 'Information Warfare' (which is btw a VERY good book on Information terrorism and counter e.terrorism, as well as providing a good design for a closed cell architecture for terrorist oragnization. A MUST read in this day and age).
With a mediocre knowledge of Electrical Enigineering, one could pretty easily be constructed, or at the very least one could construct a powerful high energy radio frequency gun, with the proper power supply. It sounds like the facility is located in a fairly insdustrialized area, meaning that the power infrastructure to power it is probably already there to be hijacked.
There is always a way, and it doesn't always involve crashing a 767 into it *grin*.
I say we show them, and any other companies boasting security of data, just how secure they really are.
Slashdotters UNITE!
There must be tens, no, dozens of people who read Slashdot! We could hack these companies just to show them it can be done!
We could take over the world!
Just as soon as I get this Vic-20 up and running...
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
an economic downturn? An exodus of companies with silly business models that scale negatively -- @home, adcritic just to name a few.
Can it survive Capitalism? Forget a foreign invasion.
No sig is worth reading.
B52 in and of itself doesn't overcome anything. Those 20 ton, modern bombs are what gets the job done.
Anyone else think this is teh 21st Century version of the Titanic?
It was built to secure the data of the world.
It was built to withstand natural disasters.
It was built to withstand armored assault.
One man would bring it down.
One man would free the information.
One man - Lord Legba!
Coming to a theater near you this summer.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Physical security--how quaint. Even if you greatly overengineer it, a widely distributed network of nodes using cryptographic techniques is likely to be much cheaper and no less secure. And it's also likely to be more resilient.
Heaviest bomb I've seen listed is the 15,000 lb (7.5 ton) "Daisey Cutter"
Much of carpet bombing still is done with 500 lb iron bombs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does ZD employ any of em?
and to this day an inspirational feet of excess engineering.
They spent a lot of money for site protection, but at the end, a simple worm like Nimda or CodeRed or something new can bring everything down.
To pick a nit, you mean "security through obscurity", not obfuscation. Obscurity means "nobody knows it's there." Obfuscation is creating confusion.
I say build it in the middle of a desert, six feet underground, under cover of night.
To which I say, satellites can see in the dark (the better to watch your construction, my dear), and they can also see these sorts of facilities six feet underground from the rather notable heat signature. Keep in mind, even if the facility is properly cooled, all that heat has to go somewhere, and the bleedoff point will give away the operation. It's the same method employed to find military bunkers in the desert. When a satellite looks down and sees a heat plume coming from nowhere, it's short work to investigate why.
Virg
> I actually prefer Missile silos for ulitmate security.
Assuming you mean reusing old missle silos, it's a bad idea, for several reasons.
1.) The old silos were not designed to handle the electrical load that a datacenter requires.
2.) Missile silos are designed to protect against nuclear strike, but not much else. Foot soldiers would make short work of such facilities. Think heavier-than-air tear gas or burning jet fuel if you don't know why.
3.) Missile silos are generally full of asbestos and other nasty stuff that would be very costly to remove.
4.) Most missile silos have water leakage problems. This wasn't much of an issue when the only thing that got wet was the tail of the rocket booster, but computers are understandably less durable in such circumstances.
5.) Data connectivity was a non-concern then (they only needed a telephone, and then only until nuclear war began), so getting them wired would be prohibitive. Just about the only answer is satellite link, but that's not secure from destruction from the air.
6.) Missile silos were not siege-ready; that is, they didn't have weeks of supplies in case they were locked in. The assumption was that by the time they had a problem with supplies, the missile would have already launched.
Virg
Not being a pedant, you just piqued my interest and I figured someone else may enjoy the fruits of my research.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade.
Give me a historical example in the most recent century how we (the United States and its allies) have "conquered and invaded," and NOT left the country more open, more free, than when we arrived.
(The only answer with any legitimacy might be Vietnam, because we gave up on conquering and cut our losses.)
Look today at Japan, Germany, Korea... established or emerging world powers, with a bright future for peace and prosperity. Kuwait was a free nation, we repelled invaders from a foreign dictatorship and returned its sovreignty.
And you MUST admit, Afghasistan's prospects for freedom look MUCH improved over six months ago.
I'm no war hawk, but the military historians who pointed this out recently sure do seem to have a point. Let us not forget that blood was shed on our soil as well, to ensure our freedom... the blood of americans, french, spanish, and other peoples in a fight to overthrow a King's power here. In the 1770s and again forty years later!
Look where we are now!
not actuall data security. Your normal bank manager don't know shit about computers, networks or any of that stuff. To try and convince them of security measures that are essentialy virtual, no physical evidence of your security, no matter how good your redundancies or encryption is, it will difficult to convince Joe Bankmanager that it is good. But show him a three foot thick concreat filled steel door and he'll say, "WOW! this place looks really secure." I'm sure hostworks knows that most of this stuff is crap and gimmicks, but their betting that it's crap and gimmick that will sell.
What about things to protect the data with? Armed guards, military/police support on request, advacned detection methods, and a 'lock-down' state in which no one can get out or leave until lock down is called off from the inside. They have to get ready for a siege, if they want to take it all the way. Also, it'd be nice if they started expanding farther and farther underground. That'd give 'data mining' a whole new meaning.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
just crack the data center. cracking into the data center would quit possible actually be the easiest. If you consider that most people would more than likely electrocute themselve trying to cut the power. HVAC, most people don't even know what it is. Where as sitting down at your computer and cracking the system would be far easier. At least in terms of actually trying. Whether your successful or not is another factor altogether.
> 3 Letters.... E M P
Two words in return: Faraday Cage. This deals with the big electromagnet as well. As for the junkyard magnet, you could just arrest or disable the crane operator before he could get it near the building.(bfg)
Virg
It matters *where* your redundancy is.
At least one firm in the World Trade Center had what they thought was a very safe backup procedure: Their data center in one tower was backed up to the second. In their minds anything that would take out *both* towers would obliterate Manhattan, and therefore was considered too remote to worry about...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I remember about 10 years back taking a tour of a major financial institutions data centre based in Edinburgh, (Scotland). The place had been built for mainframes, but they were in the middle of replacing them with a "more modern" client server paradigm (I'm spending _far_ too much time listening to my boss!). This meant that they had collosally huge rooms, chilled to about 10 degrees C, virtually empty.
There were essentially two data centres in one building, each with its own exceptionally large UPS system with rooms full of wet-cell batteries, and each with two backup generators. Naturally there were separate power feeds into the building (three separate sub-stations if memory serves). The most memorable part tho' was walking through the separating wall - 10 feet thick re-inforced concrete which, we were told, had been designed to withstand an impact from a 747. They were under the local airports flightpath - an airport whose runways will never take a 747, but anyway. The wall runs diagonally to the flightpath, but if it lands right on top they've still lost the facility.
The thing that always strikes me about all these types of centres is that they seem to ignore (or just don't talk about) the human factor. Most disaster recovery plans are just as bad. Picture the scenario - half of your facility has just been taken out by some disaster, you probably just lost half of your collegues. I won't describe the scene, but you can imagine what horrors might be going on on the other side of the 10 foot concrete wall from you - how well will the average person be able to cope emotionally, never mind how well they'll be able to do their job? I imagine a lot of people simply wouldn't be able to face coming into work in those situations.
All that said of course, from what I hear those who survived the WTC proved me wrong, but then they were making a stand against the terrorists, and I really admire that. What if though, for the sake of this scenario, the disaster had been caused by human error, natural disaster or whatever. How would people have coped and done their jobs under those circumstances. I think a lot more people would have refused to come into work, even in the disaster recovery site, and those that did would probably have been a lot more distracted and lack motivation, at least once the immediate response to the disaster was over.
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
sudan, croatia, serbia.
a backhoe can cut their data cables
Now, just one example? Noam Chomsky describes one such example of "conquering and invading" quite well:While I do agree that war is sometimes necessary, like in revolution and related things, imperialism (which is exactly what the US and it's allies have been doing for as long as they've been recognizable military powers) is in no way justifiable. Sure, sometimes it may "help," but this "help" usually just leaves the country more dependent on outside forces, and many times just places it under control of some other more "friendly" country. And there are more than enough examples of harmful United States militarism to overshadow it's "good" military activities.
Anyways, offtopic, but I just had to get my word in.
We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade.
2 - "ram proof"??? Not hardly. I don't see a double berm system. Some of those nice decorative tree planters that are actually 2 foot thick reinforced concrete might help
Your mom thought her chastity belt was ram proof. To her surprise, I flipped that bitch over and did her from behind.
Chomsky is a goddamn pinko (along with the "intellectuals" like Susan Sontag) and should have been tried for treason a long time ago. Perhaps the new anti-terrorist laws will finally allow this, but I'm not very hopeful. The liberals have an uncanny skill in defending the very enemies within. Like the Devil quoting the Bible they use the Constitution. Makes me wanna puke.
This is nowt new.
This place has been going since '98: www.thebunker.net
"A former NATO nuclear bunker, it is the most physically secure non-governmental site on earth for data storage and hosting." Well that's what they say... [that'll be the CRT induced cynicism.]
Ali [ at london . c0m ]
Random Anecdote:
In Tsutomu Shimomura's book Takedown (about the hunting and capturing of Kevin Mitnick), Shimomura describes how a snow plow would constantly sever wires running between the trailer he had his computer in and the data center next door. His solution was to wrap super strong kevlar cable around the the vulnerable data cable. This solution worked a little too well-- the snow plow caught the kevlar cable, and indeed it did not break and neither did the data cable; instead the snow plow ended up pulling off the entire side of the trailer the kevlar cable was attached to!
Okay, good structure, check.
Anyone remember what happened to CNN, MSNBC, etc. after the WTC thing? The sheer number of accesses brought them right down. It was a perfect testament to the fragility of the Web. This ought to be addressed as well; we may not always have Google's famous cache to fall back on.
The coolest voice ever.
Wow. tar slut. A person who excessively engages in the archiving of files.
Ryan
tar slut
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
After all they real attacks will be from hackers all around the world. I was told a while back about a datacenter in dallas owned by SWB. It has power grids from both dallas and fort worth, and backup generators and diesel storage tanks and first dibs on fuel. Now thats nice for power outtages, but then it has bone density scanners, and temp and floor tile sensors and guards and all this crap for nothing...after all no one is actually going to take the time to GO there to attack a clients systems. Its a total waste of money to put your system in one of these mil spec places...sheesh its just to impress that bosses or very stupid admins.
"We maintain the centre at a permanent 17-19 degrees Celsius," says Brown. "And as the heat exchanges are located within the centre they are protected from both the natural elements, and from direct attack."
"Fire prevention and control is provided through a FM200 fire suppressant system under the floor, and dry pipe sprinkler systems."
"On-site diesel storage capacity for over 40 days of full site operation."
Anyone seen the progression of the fires around Sydney. I wonder what effect it would have on such a nice building if it ever got close enough.
Here is a recent report from the Washington Post, SYDNEY, Australia -- Bush fires, many set by arsonists, raged as close as 12 miles to Sydney on Friday after flames 20 feet high consumed more than a hundred outlying homes. Fire officials also warned that hot, dry, windy weather over the next few days could trigger a second wave of destruction along the 370-mile-wide fire front surrounding the city...
... when the nuclear war comes, I'll still be able to get Star Trek newsgroups and porn. The Internet will live on.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
My issue with the Hostworks facility is that it's designed to handle physical currency, not data. You can fit a hell of a lot more electronic currency in 1 square foot than you could ever fit physical currency.
The Amadeus Data Processing Facility (aka the ADP [no relation to the ADP you see on your paychecks]) in Erding Germany is the Fort Knox of data facilities. It's designed to not only protect the servers physically, but to also protect the transactions within the facility
Amadeus is the European equivalent of Sabre in the US. They have roughly a 90% market share of the European market, 10% of the US, and a lot of the rest of the world to boot.
Their facilities are oriented towards traditional transaction processing systems (Tandem/Himalaya machines) rather than "normal" servers. While there is overlap in methodology there are a *lot* of differences. For the most part, they manage all the machines.
This facility supports all of the Amadeus traffic (both queries and bookings for hotels, cruises, airlines, car rentals, even travel insurance.), as well as the data processing for a number of international airlines (British Airways is one), and supposedly several international banks as well.
The facility is oriented around (roughly triangular) firecells, of which there are 3 for machines. These are massively over built. They were originally designing for hundreds of mainframe style machines, and (literally) tons of copper cabling in each firecell.
Each primary walkway is secured at multiple points. You're escorted at all times by a guard who doesn't have the ability to open any doors. Doors can only be opened by a guard remotely. At every point a guard can verify what he's seeing on the camera by direct visual observation.
Cooling is completely isolated from electrical which is completely isolated from network cabling which is completely isolated from the machines. Machines are the at the center of the firecells with corridors for cooling, electrical, and other support systems surrounding it. Each of the corridors is physically secure from all of the others.
ADP has enough generator power to run the entire town of Erding in the event that Erding loses it's main power source(s). Rumor has it that this has happened on numerous occasions.
Geographically isolated in a "easily defensible location". (One of those comments that kinda sticks in your mind when you hear it)
If they don't know you're coming you are stopped by armed guards before you're in sight of the building.
There is a No-Fly zone around their facility. (How this is enforced I don't know...)
Every Tandem is actively mirrored by another in a seperate firecell on a seperate floor. If your Tandem in cell-1 floor-2 goes away, the mirror in cell-3 floor-1 keeps the transaction from being lost.
The list goes on and on. Someone out there in the /. universe has to have heard of this facility and can probably fill in or correct details, but the Hostworks facility is by no means truly unique.
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
There are some kind of applications that work fine in isolation, and if this is one of them, cool. But most real-world businesses need to be connected to the rest of the world - either the Internet, or privatge networks (e.g. bank data centers talking to ATMs). The article doesn't mention physically redundant communications, though I assume they probably did use a fiber ring of some sort, which means it takes *two* backhoe hits before they're off the net and not just one. But if they're this paranoid, and not just hyping themselves, they need some radio or satellite connectivity, enough voice diversity (or cell phones) so they can talk if their phone connection gets cut, and ideally geographical diversity so that if something does go seriously wrong (flood, earthquake, etc.) they can run from their other location.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Foreign Invasion, Australia being invaded by the USA?
Somehow I don't think so.
Ok, its extreme, but a nuke on top of this would kill it. If we're assuming worst case scenarios this would be up there.
t out-to-get-me and how to cover your arse at corporate level.
The article referenced appears to just be a puff-piece, any half decent data-centre does all this and probably more.
Luckily in the UK we the The Bunker (http://www.thebunker.com). Built in an ex Air Force facility it offers protection against: nuclear attack, terrorist attack, electro-magnetic pulse, HERF weapons, electronic eavesdropping and solar flares. (Not actually used them but they have to be the coolest colo you can get!)
I have actually used a data centre in the past, which checked (carefully) any equipment you took out, but not what you took in. (Think about what you could hide in a large rackmount or tower case thats not exactly electronics - HERF guns, Semtex).
If you really want a tour-de-force of paranioa in hosting/comms/data-centres I suggest Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) not only a great book but a great lesson in just-because-im-paranoid-it-doesnt-mean-they-aren
In the end you need multiple-hardware (all of it!), multiple connections, multiple service providers (e.g. credit/debit card handling), in multiple ISPs in multiple countries on multiple continents if you really need to run 24x7 and guarantee uptime that will ensure that you're open for business even if all your customers have just been sent back into the stoneage.
The 2100 Lb B43 is no longer in the US arsenal, having been replaced by the 2400 lb B83. Perhaps you have the weight confused with the 10,000 lb B41, which had a much higher yield.
Firstly, I can find no evidence of a M110 bomb existing, other than one-line entries in copy/pasted lists on free hosting sites.
Secondly, the only aircraft capable of lifting and dropping a 7.5 ton Daisy Cutter is a C-130 (a B-52H's bomb racks aren't built to hold anything that big). This is enough to make me doubt the existance of a 11 ton bomb, which would require aircraft specially modified to handle it.
On this point, you're quite right. Getting a 20 ton yield out of conventional explosives is going to require a big bomb.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Theres is *no* absolute guarantee of security, or continued service. Its simply a matter of throwing money (and good sense) at the problem until you reduce the level of risk to one that you can tolerate.
All data centres (whether private or commercial) have their weaknesses, and all are all-too prone to human error. Whenever I've lost service with a large colo, its been someone on their side cocking up routing tables, kicking out cables or mangling DNS.
I worked for a (UK) government department who used two (private) data centres - each could provide service for the other. They also had a third, which was never used, but was kept up to date and operational in case one of the others ceased operation. Each centre also had redundancies (duplicate of everything on hot standby - mainframes, servers, control desks, comms equipment). They had two power supplies, taken direct from different power stations, massive UPSs (two of course), a generator, all comms lines were duplicated. In fact about the only thing that didn't have redundancy was the kettle in the kitchen!
Two thing occurred whilst I was involved on one on these sites:
A power line failed, UPSs kicked in but with a spike/brown out which reset all equipment - including some which didn't come back up. The generator tried to start up - but due to rabbits living in it didn't get too far (neither did the rabbits after that).
During a particulary hot summer, the rooms got slightly too hot (not hot enough to destroy the equipment tho.) The halogen systems kicked in, destroying equipment near the halogen outlet and freezing half the wall off. Of course, this also triggered the emergency power cut-off in case it was an electical fire.
In both cases, the failover to the on-site redundancy didn't go too smoothly and a small army of engineers had to go on site to recover (including myself).
On top of all this, one of the site was built on a sloping bank which had subsidence, meaning that the whole building was slowly moving downhill, and tilting. Eventually, it will stretch all those carefully installed dually redunant comms and power cables.
In summary: theres no such thing as absolute guarantees. You can throw money and time at these things until the risk is reduced to an acceptable level or your arse is covered. *BUT* there is nothing better that an enforceable contract for loss of business and consequential damages with all your providers and a healthy does of insurance for any loss of provision.
If you do find an ISP/Colo that is willing to cover consequential damages, please tell the world, I for one would be very grateful!
just cut the fiber going to the data center.
"...and you know, I heard this ship is unsinkable!" overheard at dinner, 50 deg 12 min W, 41 deg 46 min N, 2230 hours, 4/15/12
-Styopa
No, think Qatar or UAE or somewhere else with questionable government and lots of money from a natural resource, like oil. Iraq's bunkers were built by German contractors, The cave complex in Tora Bora (Afghanistan) was built with CIA help. What's to convince you that such nice secure facitilities aren't built in the wrong places? IMHO, don't let them become wrong places. Be a good global neighbor and cut the legs out from under people like Hussein and Bin-Laden with justice and compassion.
But then, you just never do know those aussies, with their leaders' strange attitudes toward the web...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
why not go down the block and cut the fiber lines running to the building? Just flip open a manhole and cut away.
you'd have to add secrecy to the list. i live less than twenty miles from that facility and have never heard about it so far...
This is a well placed marketing story whose underlying goal is to sell space. There is a glut of hosting space available right now, and these people are doing a good job of getting seen. This facility has above average physical security due to the original use of the building they bought. The data center itself seems average.
The real selling points of HSPs are bandwidth and uptime (Power, Ping, and Pipe in the jargon). Professional services sweeten the pie and put a (theoretically) knowlegeable person on site.
For real HA, setup in multiple centers, and buy enough bandwidth to keep data live in both locations. What impresses people on touring the facilities are the ancillary functions that support this - generators, dead zones, mantraps, hard walls, biometric access control, fire sniffers, security guards, battery rooms, fuel storage tanks, NOCs.
What HSPs can't supply is data integrity. This is the job of the customer.
Recursion: To curse repeatedly.
Ok it can resist everything but what happen when major internet routers remove that host from their routing tables ?
Bam it's gone...
You must have a really, really small penis...
"Remember thealamo.com!"
Seriously, though..
I am missing something here. What are you referencing to? If i go to thealamo.com i arrive at some hotel/casino. google only find advertisements.
please explain.