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Fort N.O.C.'s Security in Obscurity
penciling_in writes "Brock N. Meeks of MSNBC reports
on his recent visit to VeriSign's secret location: 'The unassuming building
that houses the "A" root sits in a cluster of three others; the architecture
looks as if it were lifted directly from a free clip art library. No signs or
markers give a hint that the Internet's most precious computer is inside
humming happily away in a hermetically sealed room. This building complex could
be any of a 100,000 mini office parks littering middle class America.' The
report goes on to say: 'Access to the Network Operations Center, the "NORAD"
of the Internet's traffic monitoring, requires the electronic badge and then a
double biometric hand print scan.' And here are Karl
Auerbach and Robert
Alberti offering their interesting analysis of this report on CircleID."
Sure, the
I'm still fuming about that.
Trolling is a art,
This could actually be dangerous. Whenever I hide something I seem to inevitably lose it...
This is also the building that has the big red button labeled "Hijack Internet Traffic"
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
now you've done it .. the terrorist will infiltrate the facility and map the goat everywhere!
you brought their server to a crawl by posting that...
and im not sure which is worse to look at... the goatse man, or rhonda...
The temple from Tron?
Approch, Program, and speak to your User...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
"There's more than the 'A' root server. Taking "it" down leaves a whole hurd of other root servers alive."
Shouldn't that be "a whole GNU/hurd"?
#DeleteChrome
More importantly, what would happen if it were struck by a nucular weapon?
If you really wanted to hide it, disguise the building as a whore house next door to a police station.
The hookers and the johns could really be Verisign employees running the root server.
In case a real customer showed up and was unfazed by the police station next door, tell him that most of the girls are at the doctors office for their tuberculosis test and the rest are being treated for various venereal diseases.
Or you could disguise it as a crack house. The neighbors would assume that everyone running around with machine guns were drug smugglers.
Or just disguise it as a police station. When someone comes in seeking assistance, tell them "We don't handle those kind of cases any more."
I'd hate to think the internet depends on SCO UnixWare running on an old 486 ;)
Jonathan
Bah! That's nothing. You need to traverse a gauntlet of obsolete motherboards, dead power supplies, empty CD cases and soda cans as well as a floor mined with tiny machine screws to get to my NOC. That's assuming you got past my wife at the front door.
That one in Dulles is a decoy. The real one is in my closet.
all you need to access it is a bomb, or, pretty much anything that explodes spectacularly.
Unless the NOC was ordered at this place, I'm not impressed.
Hate me!
If this building were destroyed by a nuclear weapon, what would be the impact on the Internet?
Oh, there's lots of things that would happen:
Mutants would crawl the Earth, CHUDs would be in the sewers, thalidomide babies would get super strong ESP and take over satellites to tell us they don't like cigarrettes and brandy, we'd have to go back to pr0n in the magazine form (but bukkake would thankfully disappear), and the Omega Man would kill zombies. There's plenty of others, but I don't want to give away the ending (but it sounds like oylent-say een-gray is eople-pay).
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
A hacker or botched OS patch could hose the thing.
I think we can be reasonably certain that VeriSign (a) only runs as much of an OS on their root server as is absolutely necessary, and (b) only patches it when it's thoroughly tested and approved by people who know what they're working on.
The way you talk, it's like you think the employees use the server for gathering Unreal Tournament games after hours or something.
It's been outsourced and housed some where in India...
ROOT-A /--
--\
)(
--/ \--
20 MBs
Visitors are "tagged and bagged" and made to sign de facto non-disclosure agreements before being lead to an elevator.
"Tagged and bagged"? Really? Visitors are killed, inventoried, and their remains placed into a body bag? And then they're asked to sign an NDA?
That really is tight security!
At the beginning of the article:
... VeriSign isn't shy about touting the $150 million it has invested in various security measures.
...
A bit later
"Can you pull that door closed? I didn't hear it click," he asks of the person standing nearest to the first door.
"Click."
Sheesh, for $150 million you'd think a robot would double check the door for them.
(Score:-1, Wrong)