Slashdot Mirror
Datacenter Robbed for the Fourth Time in Two Years
mariushm writes "According to the Register, the Chicago-based colocation datacenter C I Host was attacked by armed intruders recently, making it the the fourth time in two years that armed thugs have made off with data. According to a letter C I Host officials sent customers, 'At least two masked intruders entered the suite after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw ... During the robbery, C I Host's night manager was repeatedly tazered and struck with a blunt instrument. After violently attacking the manager, the intruders stole equipment belonging to C I Host and its customers.' Aggravating the situation, C I Host representatives took several days to admit the most recent breach, according to several customers who said they lost equipment, all the while reporting the problems as 'router failures'."
Don't tase me, bro!
Seriously, though, this sounds like something out of a really bad Hollywood B-Movie.
I didn't know you could do stuff like this in real life.
smells like an inside job / insurance scam 1st would be an anomaly , 4th time i would be looking very hard at the companies and its staffs finances
Hmm, I'm not using them anymore. They had regular power failures in Dallas - claiming 'UPS maintenance'. My home DSL setup is more reliable than their data centre.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Well, if they actually care enough to try to prevent these attacks, I can see three solutions, any of which should be highly effective:
Deadly force. If you are being robbed at gunpoint on a regular basis, your employees can legitimately say that they fear for their lives, and thus, purchasing of firearms is legally and morally justifiable. Perhaps a couple of guards posted at the entrance with semiautomatic rifles, plus three or four in appropriately concealed locations within the facility (or more if the facility is large enough). Criminals (armed or not) will think twice before attacking.
Electrical interference. Hook a 230 kV transmission line directly to the rebar in the walls. Anyone who tries to cut their way in will likely spontaneously combust, or at the very least, be knocked several meters. Such an attack won't happen twice.
Oxygen deprivation. You probably already have halon fire extinguishers. Assign everyone emergency oxygen masks and a red button remote. In the event of an attack, press the red button and put on your oxygen mask. Assuming you dump enough halon, it will bond with all the free oxygen in the room, incapacitating or killing the intruders in seconds. Assuming they survive, they should still be unconscious when the police arrive to arrest them.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Last November I had ALL my servers stolen there. Now over all the years I have had servers I have backed up data, upgraded servers, clean installed servers, etc., then that fateful day in November after being stonewalled for days I finally went over to the data center only to find ALL my servers stolen. All my data. Yea I had some offsite backups, etc, but .... stolen. I guess they thieves really liked my XServes. They were nice and shiny in a sea of beige and black.
Anyway, they gave me some free hosting after that, so, I said ok.. big mistake... about a month ago two of my three servers were stolen. Thankfully I had them a bit spread at the datacenter.
Well, can I sue? What can I do now? Same bs, promising me servers and nothing.
Last year I lost a lot of clients,,, granted all but two were mostly very small time hosting accounts. This time I now lost a big client even though I got them back up and running asap... get a server, install configure, read the files from the backup server, etc.
Anyway it was truly the worst feeling I have had in many a year.
It is definitely bs. And what do the Chicago PD do? Well your guess is as good as mine.. maybe they are out ticketing the thieves truck as their meter runs out.
Any lawyers out there that can help?
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
In that forum, it was posted that the hosting provider had posted a job application for somebody willing or able to carry a gun. They were hiring at minimum wage or just above minimum wage if you had experience with guns.
So, they're looking to hire people that carry guns that are willing to accept a job at minimum wage. That should tell you something right there.
1) Reinforcement can be added to walls. Make a sandwich of OSB | sheet Aluminum | OSB | galvanized steel | OSB. The layers will make it difficult to use a chain saw or an abrasive blade. Glue and screw the sandwich.
2) Add an alarm loop between the layers for added protection.
3) Lock the servers to the racks.
4) Have a good alarm company.
I actually had a server hosted in that very Chicago facility. (I actually got referred to it by clicking a "$75 a month colocation" advertisement link on slashdot)
The datacenter in question is in a terrible neighborhood, and I can't see anyone bothering a truck there in the dead of night.
There was no man trap, and no security of any sort, just a tech guy who let me in and opened the glass datacenter door for me.
I doubt they have a panic button of any sort either.
You disable the one guy on call and there would be no police coming, period.
We all know that bad people don't have Internet access. If they did, they might try to google for something like 'chicago colocation buildings i can break-in to', which pops up a bunch of hits for C I Host. The third hit's page exerpt/description begins with "Location: 900 North Franklin, 3rd Floor, Chicago, IL 60610". The page also says it's a nondescript building with no signage (that's okay, we have the address *and* a provided photo!!) and... hmm, we know lots of design details about the building, and there's lots of information about where things go in and out of the building. I realize that a lot of that information might be important for potential customers to know, and has to be available to non-customers, but, I would be a little more careful if I was in charge of what information was available to whom and published where, probably going with a need-to-know basis for a lot of things.
You can effectively {describe your security, network resources, and ability to accomodate customers' equipment of varying size and shape without giving out nearly so much} and/or {keep track of what information you provide to whom, when, and under what circumstances so that you could at least be able to make some educated guesses about where to start investigations of security breaches even though information does tend to spread, especially when one tries to control information, particularly when done badly}.
In a more, uh... "free" state, yes, armed security is a realistic proposition. However such states usually have less violent crime too, so you don't need them as much.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
The company I work for used to be a client of theirs, and like many others here, eventually got fed up with their constant downtime. When we canceled our service and they shipped the servers back, all four rackmount servers had the rack-screw-tabs bent because they shipped them with no padding whatsoever. They were just rattling around inside the cardboard boxes during shipment.
A former employee of CI Host contacted us after we quit their service and told us this little gem:
That time early this year when their entire Chicago datacenter was down for two days? They forgot to pay their power bill.
It couldn't have happened to a better bunch of scumbags. In fact I wouldn't be surprised at all if they robbed the datacenter themselves to destroy evidence or just for insurance fraud.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
> "Armed Hand-gun license/permit and ability to supply own weapon a Huge Plus! : translation: "we're cheap! You're desperate AND stupid! Let's talk!"
That's not the way I would translate that. Now if they had a policy of forbidding handguns to employees with a concealed weapon permit I would find that stupid.
If the job entails being the victim of attacks with lethal force (and being repeated tasered and beaten is exactly that) then personally I think it's very rational to prefer an employee that has the training and resources to defend him/herself.
A: Be a realative, family firend, or former business associate of Mayor Richard Daley. Remeber, this is Chicago, where the motto is "Vote Early, Vote Often!" Everything in city government is for sale.